Luke Painter presents two works, a drawing in the Atom Blaster Pavilion and an animation in Cinesphere.
In Luke Painter’s 3D animation, The Teasers and the Tormentors, 20th century set design from theatre, film, and illusion shows take centre stage. Fascinated by video’s capacity to create illusions, Painter uses virtual mirrors to reveal the action outside of the camera to the viewer, creating the sense that a rich, complex environment exists beyond the set.
In his drawing, Crystal Palace Warehouse, Painter references the cast-iron and plate-glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. Painter re-envisions the Crystal Palace with its transparent walls and skeletal structure as a ghostly apparition that pays homage to the architect’s small-greenhouse-made-big. Painter populates the inside of the building with images of 3D models of plants and trees that he finds online at Google 3D Warehouse and other 3D model reference websites. While Painter represents the Crystal Palace as a bygone spirit in and of itself, the virtual properties of the plants in his work also possess an uncanny element of immateriality.
Biography:
Luke Painter is an artist and a professor working in Toronto. Recent exhibitions and screenings of his work include: The Teasers and the Tormentors at Galerie Clark in Montreal (solo 2016), Ways of Something at the Whitney Museum of American Art (screening 2016) and Five Years of Contemporary Canadian Drawing at the Sudbury Art Gallery (group 2016). Luke has received grants from Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council and has been reviewed by Canadian Art, Border Crossings, The Globe and Mail and was included in Carte Blanche Vol 2 – Painting, a national survey of Canadian painters. Luke is an Associate Professor at OCAD University in Toronto.