Luke Libera Moore

Abstraction ÷ Utility = Ritual

Ritual is the quotient of utility and abstraction.

We perform rituals to push back against the unknowable – to keep the void at bay. Repetitive habits grant some semblance of solidity to our fractured selves, constantly pulled as we are between lived personhood and the image of personhood.

Here I wonder how deep the primacy of loss extends in our minds. Many faiths and philosophies lament the forfeiture of some bygone wholeness, mythological as it may be. Is banishment from Eden still the psychic scar of a secular and digital world? Something primordial beckons me from a lump of dirt: it dares me to escape. This retrogressive longing urges me to abandon modernity itself: a seemingly impossible feat. As Romantic as this sounds, it is the hypnotic cajoling of the death drive: the impulse to negate.

On the other hand, the forward momentum of possibility demands I look ahead and outwards, to what’s not yet become. Things may very well get worse, but they also could get better; suffering: abated; conflict: resolved; love: known. This is the impulse to create.

Between these two poles is the here and now. The ticking confusion of presentness, always escaping.

Too much world, yet never enough time– how the days just slip through my fingers. How sadly I’d sop up something life-affirming. Something tangible, durable, real. But the swirling time swamp just keeps trudging.

Idiosyncratic rituals concretize my life between the void of nothingness and the frenetic haze of anxiety. For the past two years, all of my personal rituals have been performed in pursuit of completing these five sculptures. These weird earthen spaceships function like agnostic icons or obsessive-compulsive totems; they anchor me like stars at night in the frustrating conundrum of my impossible fantasies; they are the abstract, imaginary tools I build in order to materialize the the daydream utopias I weave alone, always out of reach.

—Luke Libera Moore

Luke Libera Moore (b. 1990; Yonkers, NY) received an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art (New Haven, CT) and a BFA from The Cooper Union (New York, NY). His interdisciplinary working methods include sculpture, photography, writing, and drawing. His elaborate photographic constructions have been presented in various publications including Artforum and Pin-Up Magazine. Recent exhibitions include My Whole World, Baader-Meinhof (Omaha, NE); edenchrome for all, Ashes/Ashes (New York, NY); Meatware, Sumer (Tauranga, New Zealand). This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery.