Revolutionary Debris (From Icarus To Phoenix): October 12, 2023 - October 15, 2023
"Cleared from the ashes of Icarus fall, finding the bits of revolutionary debris left scattered in the rubble pile of the past. Paintings, drawings, and sculptures once left in negative energy clutches, cleansed and reincarnated to rise again, like phoenix at last." - Luke Haeger
"Clichés are cliché for a reason.
These drawings are splattered, stretched, scattered, and hung as if haphazard trophies in a bedroom. Paintings, organized chaos, oscillate between completed works and unfinished revolutionary notebooks. Magical realism marries abstraction. Teenage angst meets commodified counter-culture. Mind mapping collides with the inner child, longing to return to the room of unconditional love songs.
Surfboard blanks, modified before completion, before the glassing process that brings the object to its true function. The mechanism allowing a person to walk on water is left in its original form, subjected to sculptural sin. These Californian foam totems read as historical markers, embedded with ghosts, relics (a stick from Kurt Cobain's backyard, a ceramic rose grave-robbed from Jim Morrison's gravesite in Paris, a water-damaged laptop with a decade's worth of documentation of lost works, gone to the wild, to the abyss as Atlantis.) A Napoleon bust as a candle melts slowly, dripping to the slow rhythmic passage of time.
Clichés are cliché for a reason. There is a light that never goes out.
There is a God-driven impulse that emerges when conceiving these works, too chaotic to be replicated by a machine. Too synchronistic, personal, and pertinent to be known by anything other than me and God.
As our reality becomes further embedded with code, verbiage, and articulation, the act of drawing becomes a refuge. A rebellion of the physical. My way of fighting the acceleration in real-time, like the last physical phantom limb. My enemy, the iPhone, its unnatural iridescence haunting me every moment. My pen and pencil, mightier than the meta-weapon sword or mercurial screen. These creations are my only defense left in this hyper-suffocated realm.
Escapism as daily energetic hygiene, trying to physically navigate the rubble of the quickly outdated past and the technological present. A servant of truth in this post-truth delusion mistakenly called "reality" in which we find ourselves stuck.
The Grateful Dead skull, rotated, distorted, tilted, shifted, examined to the point of such saturation that the icon's meaning loses touch. It starts flying in 69 ways to Sunday. The good, the bad, and the ugly. The dead, the heartbeat of the "counter-culture," or a soundtrack to drugs as a weapon against us? Origin psyop? Grateful DEAd?
Icarus, the myth, and the moment both macro (Prigozhin's plane wing covered in wax) and micro, Icarus as it relates to my life, and the moment as it sediments in the physical, landing at hyper-relevance. Alluding to the economic and social reality of right now.
Taylor Swift, Bobby Jr., and THE MUGSHOT.
Operation Trinity.
Sport. Really just FOOTBALL.
Layers of signs and statements overpainted in a perpetual haze of history. Presented by the victor, who saw them in a nanosecond, then deconstructed, regurgitated in a perpetual loop.
What comes to the surface.
The codes toward TOTAL FREEDOM."
- Luke Haeger
Coming this October, we present Luke Haeger's freshman Solo Exhibition, Revolutionary Debris (From Icarus to Phoenix).
God. Praying. Luke Haeger is a Maverick. An artist working across boundaries to achieve total flight. Formerly rock 'n' rollin', now meditatively soaring through the post-postmodern, hyper-accelerated AI landscape, trying to keep humanism and the touch of the true artist's hand alive. Returning home to a gonzo dream journal approach, annotating and illustrating representational mark-making to the signs, signifiers, and signified of the times. Luke studied undergrad at UCLA, nearly completing a BFA from CalArts before dropping out to start as an artist residing in Praxis, a society-crafting company building a new city in the Mediterranean Sea. While based in NYC, Praxis has become an epicenter of alternative thinking in the West. Luke is well-versed and experienced in the art world, consistently adventuring out to parts unknown, finding new intersections and methods to deliver visually, audibly, and conceptually one of the last remaining revolutionary messages of Total Freedom. As he calls it, viva the wave.
"Cleared from the ashes of Icarus fall, finding the bits of revolutionary debris left scattered in the rubble pile of the past. Paintings, drawings, and sculptures once left in negative energy clutches, cleansed and reincarnated to rise again, like phoenix at last". - Luke Haeger
Opening Reception will be held on October 12th from 6 to 9 PM.
The exhibition will be held from October 12th to the 15th in Los Angeles, by appointment only.
