Closing Reception & Artist Talk "Shed Skin: Works by Luke Shemroske"

This event is free of charge and open to the public. Registration required.

Enjoy a guided tour led by Luke followed by a reception with light refreshments!

Shed Skin, Shemroske’s first solo exhibition showcases fifteen years of his paintings and drawings. The artwork of Luke Shemroske brings us into landscapes that are shifting, volatile, and above all, alive. Shemroske’s process is rarely straightforward, but rather a long journey of improvising, accumulating, and sometimes eviscerating. “Sometimes I’ll destroy the parts of the painting that look really strong,” he says. Such hard turns are the result of a practice described as “a conversation with myself.”

Shemroske is fixated on layers and what’s hidden beneath them. The artist describes a painting of a face that had gone through months of work. Propping the painting against a window at home, he noticed that by the morning sunlight’s rays, he could see all these “crazy abstract things underneath” that had previously been invisible. Similarly, Shemroske’s automatic, uncensored approach to text and image aims to uncover buried parts of the self. “All of these pieces have gotten lodged in my head since I was a kid,” he says. But even as Shemroske dredges up strange revelations, he submerges them once again in the maelstrom.