Luke Newton: “Off the Shelf”
Fabien Castanier Gallery
2929 La Cienega Blvd.
Culver City, CA 90232
Fabien Castanier Gallery presents OFF THE SHELF, the United States debut solo exhibit by Luke Newton, a British artist who lives and works in Paris.
OFF THE SHELF presents a lighthearted satirical assessment of what it is to live in a commercially and technologically driven society. Newton recalls DuChamp with his use of appropriation to unshackle factory made utilitarian wares into hand-made pieces of art. Taking these everyday items and ideas on which we depend, Newton re-makes them into sleek vibrant artworks, devoid of functionality. He disconnects these pieces from their intended roles, inflates their aesthetic value, and places them in a gallery context to be consumed and reflected upon.
For this exhibition, Newton decomposes precedent in order to create a new visual dialect, specific to a demographic dependent on digital form. By taking imagery from our collective history and combining it with digital symbolism, the artist has created his own vision of conceptual expression. Through a variety of mediums, he supersizes and re-contextualizes the things that comprise our modern lives. Everything from e-cigarettes, shopping carts, iPads, and hashtags are all reborn as paintings, sculptures and mixed media objects made from non-traditional materials. By reorganizing the roles of these everyday articles, Luke Newton sparks a subversive yet important conversation about the things we own and how they define us.
