Shed Skin: Works by Luke Shemroske

The artwork of Luke Shemroske brings us into landscapes that are shifting, volatile, and above all, alive. A crowded cityscape blends into veins, bones, and viscera. Birds wheel through skies filled with radiating energies. Wandering beneath, there are aliens, bogeymen, familiar cartoon characters, giant squids, and animated skulls. Most often, we find the artist’s conception of the everyman - a hairless figure with a gray pallor and vacant eyes, seeking connection with his world and its other inhabitants. His uncensored approach to layering symbols to the point of obscurity seeks to reveal buried aspects of the self, while also submerging them back into the maelstrom.

Shed Skin is Luke Shemroske’s first solo exhibition, showcasing fifteen years of paintings and drawings. Some pieces on view took over a decade to reach completion. 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.”