Luke Libera Moore

Working between photography, sculpture, and writing, Luke Libera Moore explores a multifaceted metaphysics of contemporary visuality: the intertwining if seeing and Becoming. Luke was born and raised in the rural Hudson River Valley region of New York State.  He earned his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2012 with highest honors. He lives and works in New York City. Luke will begin pursuing his MFA in Photography at the Yale University School of Art in August 2016. Recent exhibitions include: “EVA” at Interstate Projects, Brooklyn, “Things and Free Expanse” at MC2 Gallery, Milan, and “June Snow” at Evelyn Yard, London.

Prospective Ruins
The series “Prospective Ruin” proposes a hypothetical engagement with a hypothetical landscape – one eerily blanched of color like skeletal remains. These meticulously constructed still life photographs manifest a picture-world of voluptuous yet rigid, quasi-architectural forms. Forms that are in fact made of fine-detail plaster – the cast contours pulled from the fragmentary remains of contemporary life: detritus ranging from product packaging to construction debris.

That is, these spectral, imaginary landscapes are materially derived from our most commonplace morphologies – the everyday industrial designs that make up the “minor” yet ever-present architecture of our time. Through the process of surface casting, these forms speak of an oddly fossilized present: a temporal disjunction – which, in combination with their monochromatic palette- begins an unfolding estrangement of such commonplace structures.

This estrangement grows stronger, and takes on more significant narrative implications through the mysteriously totemic, seemingly ceremonial compositions. When such “Totemic Formations” are juxtaposed with the more dissected “Index” photographs – the dynamic between a suggestive spiritualism and the “scientific gaze” connotes the presence of some anthropological agency intervening within this hypothetical landscape.

With this in mind, these decontextualized relics of the immediate present concoct a curious, if not ominous visual drama – a drama which thrusts the viewer into the imaginary position of archeologist (human or otherwise) tasked with studying an unknowable history yet to be made. The resultant mystery chimes with more epistemological questions than it seeks to answer– though it ultimately hopes to propose a somber rumination on temporality and Being itself.

Simply put, “Prospective Ruin” hopes to offer a memento mori for the 21st century.

… How might we encounter the aftermath of our own extinction?

To see more of Luke’s work, check out his website.