Alex Lukas

Gallery Affiliations: Steven Zevitas Gallery, Guerrero Gallery

Region: Northeast

Creating works on paper that incorporate a variety of media (ink, watercolor, acrylic, gouache, and silk screen), my depictions of a near-future strive to explore the fragility of our current society and the physical infrastructure built to support it. Through scenes of devastated landscapes, crumbling foundations, overturned trucks and telling signs of human despair, I look to examine our cultural fascination surrounding our national mortality as well as the desensitization to the aesthetics of destruction. With hyper-realistic motion pictures and unforgiving news footage blurring the visual boundaries of fiction and reality by depicting seemingly identical—and equally riveting—façades of tragedy, I explore depictions of disaster in contemporary media. By appropriating photographic spreads of well-known metropolises torn from vintage publications and transforming the original image, I push these aging illustrations in futuristic contexts, questioning the line between past and future, between truth and myth.