Kristy Luck “Giving Something a Name Doesn’t Make It Real”
Drawing upon memory, story and an inventory of family heirlooms, Luck feels into her family bonds and Navajo heritage. “Reflection is a doorway to knowing oneself,” Luck comments, but as her show title suggests, identity eludes descriptions by language and history. If giving something a name doesn’t make it real, what does make something real?
Several of Kristy Luck’s most recent works contemplate a reoccurring, active figure of unknown identity and activity. Luck maintains a shadow mask - a literal shroud of mystery - around the figure. At the same time, the figure is subject to illumination, both on and around it. An undeniable moment of pure aesthetic revelation occurs in each painting where such illumination appears. Luck revels in painting light. Whether real or apparition, primordial or personal, symbolic or characteristic, a reflection of the viewer’s own understanding - of self, identity and humanity - emerges alongside the recurrence of this figure.
Around these possible narratives, characters and reflections, the boundary between environment and object collapses and a setting both surreal and specific emerges. Luck paints imagined scenes constructed of personal objects locating a formative experience - tools of costuming, a detached ruff, a bracelet, all of which have been reorganized according to an unknowable standard of value and description. Berries of equal mass to human-like form, for instance; a pillow becomes a place, a bracelet is both a bond and an entry, tree branches and staircases extend beyond the exterior elemental realms of the wild and the domestic to reflect a more interior and psychological vantage point. Other objects and environments remain unidentifiable - their reference point of palpable significance but one deliberately withheld from viewers all the same, like a deeply buried secret Luck means not to keep, but to spare us from, as the title of the show suggests she will.
Press release and images via Philip Martin Gallery, LA.
