Gina Luke

Treading Lightly

In the exhibition Treading Lightly, the illusionary aspects of projection have been utilized to create flexible and phantastic space, where regular possibilities feel as though they are suspended. A series of three works, use the technical methods of projection and virtual editing to discuss the convergence of the analogue and virtual realm as well as the overlap between the digital and natural worlds. These works, based in animation are activated in physical space through sculptural means.

Each artwork, functioning together, offers an alluring and naturalistic escape to the outside world as a way to explore the intersections between the digital and natural world. Cloud Gazer, a hypnotizing digital display creates a cloud field in which one can become transfixed. This work, placed in the upper corner presents a surreal shift of architectural space, where our perceptions and understanding of our environment become altered. Through this installation, one is able to reflect on our engagement with the natural environment during the digital age.

These works recognize the numerous ways we have already been living in a somewhat synthetic reality, where cellular screens are suspended in our eyeline, redirecting our paths and predetermining our decisions. Treading Lightly reflects on the ways that our daily routine has been shifting towards both a natural and digital way of being in the world. The organic, familiar materials embedded in each artwork range from organic earth like metals, water textures, to manipulations of our own organic human form. These textures are presented through the digital container of projection, as kinetic elements on the surface of cut-out, sculptural forms. The containers move and gesture uncannily, beckoning for a viewer’s attention before slipping into the seams of space.

These projections offer a virtual window to the natural world. With organic colour and texture, natural light, and an uncanny, elastic motion these works appear alive, providing a form within which we can re-evaluate our relationship to our surroundings and environments as we venture further into the digital era.

Cloud Gazer

Metallic, displays bodily shapes as molded, bent, animated pieces of glimmering metal. When in motion these forms portray naturalistic human-like maneuvers that appear to occur autonomously. This natural-digital movement is derived from an animation technique that prompts a viewer to perceive a synthetic object as living.

Click on the video above to watch the Metallic animation.

Gina Luke talks about the process of making Metallic in a Studio Video

Home

Home is a series of heavily composited forms that presents a series of cyclical images and movements offering the motion of an autonomous, life-like organism. As the forms are approached, a viewers’ shadow is cast into the shape, activating both analogue-organic and virtual realms.

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About the Artist

Gina Luke

https://pomoarts.ca/artists/luke-gina-

Gina Luke is a multidisciplinary artist, who recently completed a BFA with honours at the University of Victoria’s Visual Arts program. Her artistic practice explores the integration of drawing with sculptural and texturized video installation. Luke uses drawing as a basis to explore abstract possibilities that can be expressed in a new media art practice. She has participated in group and solo exhibitions in Eastern and Western Canada. Her exhibition practice is based on Vancouver Island where she has also recently worked as a curator with the Victoria Film Festival.

Artist Statement

I investigate our surroundings in relationship to our bodies through an integrated animation and installation based art practice. I don’t animate; I produce drawings and forms that move in immersive projection environments and across sculptural materials. By adjoining digital rendering and tactile material, my work transports viewers to a flexible space where one can examine the intersection of digital life with our natural world. Through highly saturated imagery displayed on sculptural forms, I create spaces of phantasmagoric experience.

The body of artwork included in Treading Lightly, present a new perspective to the ordinary spaces we encounter. Through recording and translating urban and natural areas in the world with digital media, these works present physical projections into a digital yet familiar world. This virtual space of Treading Lightly acts as a new way to preserve and interpret our usual surroundings under a new light.

Support our local arts community

For more information about Gina Luke please see her profile on the Artist Directory.

Gina Luke was one of two recipients awarded the Kwi Am Choi Exhibition Scholarship for 2020. The 2021 scholarship opens for submissions in late August 2020

Port Moody Arts Centre is a nonprofit society. An artist profile page on the Artist Directory is one of the benefits when you support PoMoArts by becoming a member.