ALEX LUKAS
2023 - Now
CA53776V2.gallery
CV FOLLOW
Wide Scenarios for Indoor & Outdoor, October 26th - December 5th, 2024
Wide Scenarios for Indoor & Outdoor questions how technological advancements, global marketplaces, and online image generation have facilitated an ideological drift in the medium of print from an asset for the activist left to a tool for the right to refute democratic ideals.
For the past several years, Alex Lukas has scoured Amazon, downloading and cataloging the graphics posted by vendors in their online advertisements for “custom printed flag.” While innocuous at first glance, a deeper dive into these default images reveals a troubling pattern: a subtle (and not so subtle) iconography of the political right. This visual coding transforms the flag from a representation of shared ideals into an endlessly personalizable manifestation of a much-mythologized rugged individualism. The exhibition was accompanied by a small pamphlet.
Written Names Fanzine #12: Names Written in Chewing Gum, San Luis Obispo, California, 2023
In downtown San Luis Obispo, California, an alley is caked in bubble gum. For decades, locals and tourists have been adhering their wads to the site. It can smell nauseatingly sweet, and the sticky candy quickly accumulates a layer of brown grime and dust. New additions stand out brightly on the dull background. Ambitious visitors stretch and assemble multiple pieces of gum together to form names and initials on the wall.
(Written Names Fanzine documents hyper-localized occurrences of unsanctioned public name writing. Each issue focuses on a single site, chronicling and augmenting these shared experiences of place, history, tourism, and localized assertions of identity through documentation, research, transcription, and design.)
Written Names Fanzine #11: Names Written in Under a Bridge & In Yearbooks, Matfield Green, Kansas, 2023
Matfield Green, population 49, sits quietly in the Flint Hills of Kansas. On the edge of town, next to where the high school once stood, a bridge crosses the south fork of the Cottonwood River. While the school has long since disappeared, the scrawled names of students remain under the bridge, along with their graduation dates. This issue of Written Names Fanzine pairs the graffiti with redacted yearbook photos of the authors from the Chase County Historical Society.
Your Flag, 2024
In the run-up to the 2016 US presidential election, "This Machine Kills Fascists'' stickers were affixed to Risographs, laser printers, and relief presses across the country. Broadsides featuring the phrase were posted in the windows of cooperative and academic print shops alike, and my social media feed was peppered with repurposings of Woody Gutherie's famous slogan. Print, the adage supposed, would save democracy.
Flash forward to the first 2020 presidential debate, where then-President Trump urged the Proud Boys to "stand back and stand by." Merchandise pairing the phrase with the hate group's name was available for purchase online almost before the debate concluded. Three months later, insurgents storming the Capitol were outfitted head-to-toe in Trump gear, draped in Trump flags, carrying dye sublimation printed Q-anon banners, and (improbably) sporting facemasks custom-printed with anti-masking slogans. In contrast to the hand-painted and carefully crafted placards of 2020's Black Lives Matter marches, January 6th was awash in low-run, professionally made swag. It's all quite simple and quick to have printed.
Despite e-commerce sites' efforts to deplatform far-right makers, easy-to-use mockup software and no-overhead drop-ship services continue to aid the speedy manifestation of slogans, iconography, and memes into custom t-shirts, lapel pins, embroidered patches, coffee mugs, and countless other formats. Direct-to-garment print shops, often clustered in tourist destinations like Keystone, South Dakota, or Gatlinburg, Tennessee, offer lightning-quick wearable quips responding to the latest political talking points.
Amidst this proliferation, a new aesthetic has developed. This coded look, readily apparent in the marketing and advertising of print-on-demand services, unmistakably brands these offerings as aligned with far-right ideologies. Distinct from leftist visuals, which remain rooted in analog printmaking technologies like serigraphy and relief printing, this emergent visual style builds on the popularity of memes and other digitally native imagery. Uniquely suited to bring CMYK images into the streets, print-on-demand has proven an effective visual tool for the right.
Your Flag: Print-on-Demand and an Emergent Aesthetic of the American Right, 2024
“Intermittently Off the Air” (January '23, KCLU.org), 2023
This series explores mildly catastrophic phrases appropriated from real and imagined disasters. These official and quasi-official texts are culled from the recently-inaugurated national alert system, government guidance for avoiding being eaten by a bear, think pieces on pop culture post-apocalyptic narratives, and more. Each drawing presents a double text, where language is meticulously rendered as stylized graffiti, inspired by late 90s illicit murals executed underneath bridges in Boston, and repeated as a Mylar-backed perforation, evoking roadside warning signs and antiquated library marking mechanisms.
“Avoid Carcasses” (Hike in Bear Country, NPS.gov), 2023
“No Action Is Required” (National Wireless Emergency Alert System), 2023
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.
Tree Stones, 2020 - 2024
Initially a late Victorian aristocratic fad, headstones carved to resemble tree stumps proliferated in the early twentieth century as a death benefit for the Woodmen of the World fraternal order. While long out of fashion, these “imperishable botanicals” can be found today sprouting in the graveyards of Los Angeles, lonely burial grounds in rural New Mexico, and historic garden cemeteries in New England. They are decidedly odd and beautiful objects. Here, miniature tchotchke versions of these “Tree Stones” flash a new municipal language of warning and distress. Broadcasting headlines, stump speeches, and other familiar mantras these new memorials are updatable remnants and cautionary souvenirs.
Made while in residence at the John Michael Kohler Art Center's Arts/Industry program, Sheboygan, WI
A Faithful Re-Creation of the Ill-Fated: Souvenir Images Commemorating Wax Remembrances of
Abraham Lincoln’s Assassination, 2024
Magic Show is global sign collective of artists and designers organized by Mads Lynnerup and Jon Rubin. Each month, one member of the collective proposes a text and/or image for a public sign that is uniquely made by all the other members, in their own style and local language, and placed in one or more public settings in the city in which they live.
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. (Beta Epochs is Madeleine Eve Ignon and Alex Lukas)
Still, 2023
Still invited family, friends, and family friends who are as good as family to record themselves reading five short phrases. This brief script was culled from a municipal lexicon of contagion seen on roadside Variable Message Signs during the pandemic.
Recordings were submitted as voice memos or left as voicemails and collaged to form a cacophonous chorus of mutual care, repositioning the cold, stark language of public health as a personal and intimate (if anxious) recitation of and meditation on proximity, movement, and togetherness.
The cast is composed of family I quarantined with, friends who went shopping for me early in the pandemic when grocery stores only let a few people in at a time, and for whom I later returned the favor. These are the voices of my small circle who'd test before entering each other's home, call apologetically if they'd had close contact with someone positive, and reach out as we each got sick to see how we could help.
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