Lucas Knipscher
Thomas Duncan Gallery
6109 Melrose Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90038
April 26 – June 1
Thomas Duncan Gallery is pleased to announce its second solo exhibition with New York-based artist Lucas Knipscher.
“A profusion of images in our daily world turns everything into visual content that we may experience as soft, hollowed out, or somehow less real. The unavoidable materiality of the photographic image, long a preoccupation in Lucas Knipscher’s work, presents a series of solutions to problems the image may or may not have, proving them as real as you or me.
The first of these solutions is that the images can be sent to a boot camp where they will be put through a grueling process of development until they can stand on their own two feet. The canvases will be coated and recoated in photographic emulsion, developed and redeveloped until what comes out in the end is hardly recognizable as the original image at all.
A second option is to foster the photographic image out to a family of paintings. The image will be raised unaware of its original status and will grow up thinking and acting like a painting. The photographic emulsion will be applied to it roughly, with an expressive hand, showing the visible traces of gestures over the course of its short life.
A more ancient and holy way of doing this would be to send the images to the priest doctor in order to give them some experience (you can develop through experience or magic) thereby making them seem more real. For example in a ritual dance – a shamanistic three-legged dance with a staff and some Indonesian loomwork – the image is tied to one foot, the material to the other and you dance so fast that they blur together. Offering up the works for some rain, burnt things, rags; this elaborates a distant journey of the devotional practices of photography, to the vocational and semi-still mystical practices of art. A primal stirring to create…a Bigfoot”. –Eva Kenny
