Luke Dohner

The Ernest Rubenstein Gallery at the Educational Alliance is pleased to present a solo exhibition dedicated to the work of Luke Dohner (1959-2024). Have You Seen A Lost Idea? is a collection of Dohner’s works primarily created on the Lower East Side from 1995-2024. In all of his works you’ll find the wonder hidden below the surface of the everyday through works created in ceramic, glass, paper, plastic and pixels.

“Lost idea” has deep resonance because this past spring, we lost Luke Dohner to cancer. Since 2016, he was a fixture of the Educational Alliance community, concentrating his work in the Ceramics Studio.

Dohner was an ideas driven artist, at times referring to his work as “warm conceptualism.” His work is playful and provocative, often juxtaposing functional and cast-off objects with materials you could get at a dollar store. He wrote about his art, “I want to give the viewers and myself a feeling of ‘soothing agitation. To push and form my ideas and materials into a state of ‘normal wonderment’.”

In many ways, the icons of this show are his sculptures, where commonplace objects are transmuted and bound by idiosyncratic structures of glass and silicone. He describes them as: “Breadbox glass construction sculptures that relate to the future by preserving their contents forever. Forever includes the future. Forever the same. At the same time the sculpture’s construction is Futuristic. The materials stand without a frame support as if floating. Imagine a skyscraper without a super structure frame to hold the floors and walls. Every view is a clear glass view, all the better to see the future. These sculptures represent a future free of symmetry. No monotonous boxes, no redundant spheres […] always different from each angle.”

The title of the show is based on a project from 2009 where Dohner created flyers that he posted on downtown light posts, walls and phone kiosks pleading, “Have you seen a lost idea?” Complete with tear tabs to contact him, the flyer stated: “Please please help if you know anything. Email my idea to the tabs below. Any missing Ideas needs (sic) so be found.” Another flyer project, “FREE Art Review,” offers to have your work critiqued by a practicing artist if you send images to freeartreview at gmail dot com.

The installation of Plastic Bags of Time (2010) was recreated for this exhibition. Dohner describes his intention: “I want to be horrific and humorous at the same time. Actually it ridicules and laughs at time. I want this sculpture to disable the notion of time, future and death. All the clock faces mashed up at the top of the sculpture, as if sucked into an air vent, broken, disregarded, just worn out measurement devices. The plastic bags on a tight black rope frame are a horrible reminder of how long plastic bags take to degrade. The rope is meant to evoke structures that plastic bags get caught on, like a chain link fence or a tree branch.”

Dohner created the practice of Heavy Yoga (©Luke Dohner), a movement born from his fascination with nature, culture and everyday experience. In contrast to the strict poses of yoga practiced in the West, the Heavy Yoga practitioner (who could be any one of us) surrenders themselves to the natural force of gravity, achieving “the lovely laziness of the present.” Dohner writes about Heavy Yoga, “Your body becomes a blob on the ground. Melting away into the small bumps and cracks in the floor.” The two drawings Heavy Yoga Gravity (2004) and Heavy Yoga Gorilla (2004) Dohner created inspired by the “Gravity is Love” philosophy of Heavy Yoga.

Born in 1959 in McAllen, TX, Luke Dohner lived primarily in Chicago, IL and Lisbon, Portugal until he moved to NYC’s Lower East Side in 1999. Dohner received a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1985. After graduation he was a fixture in the Chicago Gallery scene, showing regularly at Ten in One Gallery, and in solo exhibitions at DePaul Art Museum, College of DuPage Gallery. His work was included in group exhibitions at Randolph Street Gallery, Hyde Park Art Center, Name Gallery and MWMWM in Chicago. Dohner had a 1998 solo exhibition at Galeria Monumental in Lisbon, Portugal. In 1990, Dohner co-founded “Flo Tilla,” an event of floating sculptures and performances on the Chicago River held annually until 1995.

“Introducing Luke Dohner to new audiences and summarizing aspects of his creative output is no easy task, nor is it a difficult one. The everyday and the universal are inherent in Luke Dohner's art, making much of his work joyfully subversive, and appealing to a viewer in an ‘I could have made that' practical sensibility. Much of Luke's art centered on choices; the choice not to prioritize traditional art materials; the choice to include everyday experiences over literary or art historic references; the choice to prioritize wonder over pretension.”

—Walter Andersons (longtime friend and artist)