Luke Murphy: Good Light

"I think about screens a lot – almost as much as I think about painting. Both can give me great pleasure, anxiety, happiness, and sometimes dread.

"Screens have traditionally been for entertainment or information, and for last few decades, for work. But now screens are mostly for advertising, and if they aren't selling you something, they are stealing something from you. Like many of us, they are vehicles subject to the goals of larger organizations be it commercial or political. I try to release them from all that so they can play, and when they play, we can see more about what they are physically, and imagine other possibilities for them and ourselves. And somehow, at least for me, that presents an opportunity for grace. I am not guilty or anxious when I work on them or when I sit amongst them in my studio. They are broken but liberated. They want nothing from me. Like paintings, my sculptures are often concerned with light. And that light proves to be a warm companion." –Luke Murphy CANADA is pleased to present Good Light, a solo exhibition by Luke Murphy in the gallery’s project room. Murphy, a pioneering artist, was among the first to use the internet and coding to create art. His new light sculptures are still driven by computer programs he writes himself. Trained as a painter, his work continues to be fed by the compositional concerns and the histories of the medium. The pieces are straight forward: pairing a found object, often an old one, with the LED panels that he programs to display colorful abstract imagery. His wide-ranging interests include pattern, randomness, spirituality, the archaic and the sublime.

Murphy’s primary material is the quotidian LED panel, manufactured by the millions for advertising displays, yet he never uses them exactly as intended. Instead, he pieces them together to form undulating quiltlike mats of light that bend and flop around architecture and objects. In Ladder 2 Murphy takes his cue from the ancient Indian board game Snakes and Ladders (Chutes and Ladders in the USA) as well as the story of Jacob’s ladder from the book of Genesis. Murphy creates a snake-like length of LED panels that he weaves through the rungs of an old stepladder. Streams of colored light flow up and down, echoing both the game and the biblical story. Murphy explores the connection between heaven and earth, and the moral climb and subsequent falls which are classic narrative tropes of human experience.

Often art that employs the technologies that Murphy uses either offers an unexamined spectacle of twinkling lights, or it evokes a nightmarish AI driven future full of destruction and chaos. Murphy’s vision invites the viewer to enjoy the sublime nature of flickering colors and randomly generated patterns, delivered through objects reassuring in their commonness. Both miraculous and throwaway, his materials open unexpected channels of mediation and repose, like the flicker of firelight on a cave wall.

Luke Murphy (b.1963, Boston, MA) has exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA), Scottsdale, AZ; CANADA, New York, NY; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL; Parisian Laundry, Montreal, Quebec; and Postmasters, New York, NY, among others. He received his BS from the University of Toronto in 1985; BFA from Nova Scotia College of Art And Design in 1988; and MFA from State University of New York at Purchase in 1991. He lives and works in New York, NY.