Glowlab is pleased to present The Eventuality of Daybreak, a solo exhibition by Alex Lukas featuring a new series of post-apocalyptic urban landscapes that blur the visual boundaries of fiction and reality. Glowlab will host a reception for the artist on Thursday, November 12, 2009, from 7 to 9 pm.
Alex Lukas
Lukas’ work explores the existence of disaster, be it realized or fictitious, in contemporary society. Hyper-realistic motion pictures and unforgiving news footage depict seemingly identical – and equally riveting – facades of tragedy. The artist recognizes that relentless visual bombardment has resulted in society’s desensitization to the aesthetics of destruction.
For The Eventuality of Daybreak, Lukas has selected photographic spreads of well-known metropolises from vintage publications and uses them dually as canvas and unlikely subject. Through a deft handling of paint and carefully placed screenprinted passages, the artist pushes these aging illustrations in futuristic contexts. Submerging these cities conceptually and physically, Lukas inundates images of American cities with layers of media representing cataclysmic floods and crippling overgrowth.
Also included in the exhibition are works on paper depicting near-future scenes of devastated landscapes – crumbling infrastructure, overturned trucks and telling signs of human despair. As a counterpoint to the underwater cities, these darkly atmospheric and barren vistas signal devastation through an unsettling sense of absence.
Lukas’ intentional use of dated imagery presented in tandem with contemporary situations forces the viewer to reconcile two differing ideologies of urban space. The artist’s work calls into question society’s collective acceptance of the urban environment as an arena of destruction, once thought unthinkable and now seemingly inevitable.
The Eventuality of Daybreak is Lukas’ first solo exhibition with Glowlab. Lukas’ work has also been exhibited in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Stockholm and Copenhagen as well as in the pages of Swindle Quarterly, Proximity Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, The Drama and The New York Times Book Review. Lukas is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design and currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where he is a member of the artist collective Space 1026.
Exhibition dates: November 12 – December 06, 2009
Opening Reception: Thursday November 12, 7-9pm
Admission: free
Gallery hours: Tuesday-Sunday, 12-6pm
Location: 30 Grand Street between Thompson St. and 6th Ave.
www.glowlab.com
