ALEX LUKAS
2023 - Now
Fanzines and Pamphlets University of California at Santa Barbara CONTACT FOLLOW
Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language,
January 18th - April 27th, 2025
The visual output of Californian artists has, for over half a century, embraced the written word as the site for aesthetic play. Spanning painting, drawing, printmaking, and more, Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language brings together more than twenty artists rooted in the state who play with the boundary between language and image as a central component of their visual practice. Through a lyrical, playful, and colorful use of text, their artworks revel in local and regional influences, including hand-painted signage, music, automobile culture, graffiti, activism, and technology, reflecting the unique cultural space of the Golden State.From gothic scripts that evoke the aesthetic legacies of colonialism to gentle gradients and psychedelic motifs, this exhibition critically examines what California "looks like" by proposing a distinct aesthetic language that explores underrecognized, marginalized, and subcultural histories, cycles of migration and displacement, vernacular and pop-culture forms, and speculative, celebratory
futures.
Public Texts pays specific attention to work that escapes the confines of the gallery to engage in a visual call and response with unexpected, expansive audiences. Printed multiples, from counterculture zines to music fliers, as well as public interventions spanning protest posters and stylized graffiti scripts, are a specific focus of the exhibition. In that spirit, the show extends beyond the museum, welcoming several new, temporary outdoor commissions to the University of California Santa Barbara campus. These site-specific public works will emerge over the course of the show, offering museum visitors and students opportunities to witness an evolving experience that grows and changes over the course of the exhibition.Public Texts will also include an interdisciplinary pedagogical space inside the museum designed to support multiple forms of instruction, public programming, and unique opportunities for interactivity, play, and study.
Artists in the exhibition included American Artist, Tauba Auerbach, John Baldessari, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, Rose D’Amato, Emory Douglas, Ana Teresa Fernández, Eve Fowler, Alfonso Gonzalez Jr., Ozzie Juarez, Corita Kent, Christine Sun Kim, Kate Laster, Los Jaichackers (Julio César Morales & Eamon Ore-Giron), Barry McGee, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Devin Reynolds, Guadalupe Rosales, Glen Rubsamen, Ed Ruscha, Ben Sakoguchi, Georgina Treviño, Wes Wilson and others.
Rose D'Amato, Diamond St. to Ingalls, 2025
Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language is organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara and curated by Alex Lukas, Associate Professor of Print & Publication Arts. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the support of the University of California Santa Barbara's Art Equity Commons (a UCoP Advancing Faculty Diversity Initiative), the AD&A Museum Council, and the Academic Senate. Professor Lukas' curatorial research has been supported by a University of California Regent's Humanities Faculty Fellowship.
FKA CA53776V2.gallery is a new iteration of Alex Lukas's dashboard exhibition space, a href="https://ca53776v2.gallery/" target="_blank">CA53776V2.gallery. The original project was an experimental curatorial platform housed on the dashboard a 2007 Ford Ranger; programming focused on the intersection of intimacy, touch, and craft on, in, and around the American road. The "space" closed when four of the Ranger's six engine cylinders began perpetually misfiring. The resurected project presents a curated selection of oversized artist-designed bumper stickers displayed on the roof of a 2023 Subaru Outback in the dubious lineage of "World's Largest" roadside attractions.
FKA CA53776V2.gallery at Acid Free V Participating artists included Eden Kurr (pictured above), Nicole Lavelle, Shaun Slifer, Mike Smith, and Ralph Stollenwerk.
FKA CA53776V2.gallery at Other Places Art Fair 7 Participating artists included Yasmeen Abedifard (pictured above), Charlie Macquarie, Matt McKibbin, Franklin Fantini, and Northern Sun.
FKA CA53776V2.gallery at Printed Matter's LA Art Book Fair Participating artists included Will Brown, Christopher DeLoach, Mike Devine, Sky Fusco, Brendan Hanna (pictured above), Jesse Malmed and Zach Ozma.
FKA CA53776V2.gallery in Skylight Above at Atrium Art Fair Participating artists included Jon Rubin, Kate Laster, Loud Flower Art Co, and Ruben Ochoa (pictured above).
Beta Epochs
Beta Epochs was an unapologetically unpolished, collaborative adventure. Organized aspirationally in the lineage of basement punk shows and unsanctioned raves, this exhibition brought together work from nearly thirty artists in a 4,200-square-foot warehouse situated between downtown Los Angeles and Echo Park Lake. Driven by an interest in playful, curious maximalism, materiality, non-linearity, visible processes, and direct engagement with the ‘unfinished’ nature of the exhibition space, Beta Epochs embraced quirky possibility and dusty spareness in direct opposition to the white cube.
Curated by Madeleine Eve Ignon and Alex Lukas with a spirit of hopeful play and raw curiosity, Beta Epochs proposed an ambitious and optimistic new beginning to move past the weirdness and isolation of the previous pandemic-plagued years, creating space for disheveled cooperation and community away from the keyboard. After becoming overly acquainted with each other’s sweatpants, stained shirts, postponed haircuts, and cluttered apartments in the background of Zoom calls, there is no polish anymore. Instead of a return to a pre-pandemic shine, Beta Epochs proposed an embrace of vulnerability and messiness as a space possibility. Participating artists included Serene Blumenthal, Cara Lasell Bonewitz, Peggy Chiang, Kevin Clancy, Bailey Clark, Marisa de la Peña, Stephanie Dotson, Kim Garcia , Matt Leines, Kayla Mattes, Rita McBride , Christina McPhee, Madeleine McQuillan, Adam Milner, Shana Moulton, Megan Mueller, Minga Opazo, Elisa Ortega Montilla, Riviera Parking , Ben Peterson, Sarah Rosalena, Chris Rucker, Vanessa Wallace-Gonzales, David Wesley White, and Kareem Michael Worrell.
CA53776V2.gallery, 2021 - 2023
CA53776V2.gallery was an exhibition space on the dashboard of a 2007 Ford Ranger. Expanding on a cultural understanding of the dashboard as a place of public display, CA53776V2.gallery explored intimacy, touch, and craft on, in, and around the American road space. Initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic while the Ranger sat largely unused, CA53776V2.gallery positioned the truck’s passenger cab as a glass vitrine. From 2021 to 2023, CA53776V2.gallery mounted exhibitions while parked on the 300 block of West Anapamu Street in Santa Barbara, California. The display rotated whenever the truck moved, most frequently for street cleaning (Wednesdays on the odd side of the street, Thursdays on the even side) and occasionally for trips to the grocery store.
Exhibition #1, Spring 2021
Exhibition #2, Fall 2021
Exhibition #3, Spring 2022
Exhibition #4, Fall 2022 - Spring 2023
Group Text, Curated by Beta Epochs
Words and images drink the same wine. There is no purity to protect. - Marlene Dumas, 1984
Today we find ourselves inundated with language at every turn. From the barrage of advertising that continues to define our experience under capitalism, to protest signs held aloft in the street and draped from highway overpasses, to the warming buzz of messages from friends perpetually landing in our pockets, we are incessantly reading at a grand and historically unprecedented scale.
This inundation, then, presents a very real possibility for a contemporary condition of soft focus; glossed eyes doom scrolling without reading, vision blurring text into a mush of formal elements. The line, form, and shape of language collapses as our eyes seek respite, text slipping into indecipherability like a graffiti covered wall. We all feel a little tipsy.
While today’s text-based practitioners face the same tension that has bedeviled visual artists for centuries: what is seen, what is read, and in what order, they are also presented with an opportunity to snap language back into sharp focus. Group Text, curated by Beta Epochs for Left Field Gallery, investigates the values and aesthetics of current cultural lexicon and visual semantics. The show brings together eight artists, all of whom employ written language as an integral part of their visual lexicon. From reappropriating calligraphic forms, to exploring the ephemerality of the written word and demanding new forms of legibility, artworks in the exhibition propose new avenues for how visual artists engage with text. It’s messy work, blurring text and texture, a sense of place with displacement, and extricating and examining text from and within the landscape. Participating artists included Eleanor Foy, Natalie Lerner, Hương Ngô, Ziba Rajabi, Glen Rubsamen, and Hunter Saxony III. (Beta Epochs is Madeleine Eve Ignon and Alex Lukas)
Walk-In Movies, 2018 - Present Each iteration of Walk-In Movies presents a selection of thematically related videos projected simultaneously across multiple channels. Audio for each channel is broadcast on small FM transmitters within the screening venue. Audience members are supplied with small FM radios allowing them to move from screen to screen at their own pace, tuning into the audio for the video in front of them, a local radio station, or really whatever soundtrack they'd like.
DBQ Project Space (A Working Name), 2015 - 2017 in collaboration with Leah Mackin. The DBQ Project Space (A Working Name) was a phyiscial setting in Pittsburgh's Friendship neighborhood dedicated to realizing collaborative research-based projects and interventions.
2023 - Now
Fanzines and Pamphlets University of California at Santa Barbara CONTACT FOLLOW All content (C) Alex Lukas, 2011 - 2026
|
