Luke Gawron At UUCL

UUCL is proud to be holding a temporary art exhibit of the work of Luke Gawron in Founders hall.

 

Luke Gawron is a fine artist and art educator who lives in Elizabethtown Pennsylvania with his
wife and 2 children. He has earned a Batchelor’s degree from Kutztown University and a Masters from
Millersville University. His primary art mediums are painting and collage. Often times he uses collage as
a sketching medium before scaling his artworks to a much larger size using acrylics and spray paints. He
also uses found materials to create all his own surfaces and most of his 3-dimensional artworks. Outside
of art-making, Luke enjoys cooking and the great outdoors.

Artist Statement:

In 2017 I began graduate school, starting with a 5-week intensive class on collage; the art of combining paper media to make an artwork. While familiar with the process, I had never practiced it more often than some minor experimentation. During that class, collage changed from a chore into something I really enjoyed and I began implementing it as one of my primary forms of art. Several years later, while working on yet another graduate school class, I was tasked with creating a small series for a painting final. Unsure of what to create, I decided to paint a few of my collages I had done years prior. Starting with Child Care (2018), I felt like I really found a niche and began producing paintings in this style for myself and not just as an assignment.

Each of these artworks began as a collage, clipped and pieced together from National Geographic Magazines. It allows me to find different people across cultures, ages and time periods to make the context somewhat ambiguous. I’m typically drawn to the images of people, imagining the narrative that goes with each photo. This helps me create a collage that speaks to a human experience, and hints at social justice narratives. As I turn these collages into paintings, I change colors and certain elements, while adding and subtracting what is needed to complete the composition. I also introduce spray paint and collage into the final painting as a finishing touch.

In this series At What Cost, I combine different people and backgrounds to create a narrative of our declining environment and society, and how different people are forced to interact with it. Some may be ignoring the situation, while others may have no other choice to react to their situation. Additionally, I take great care in titling these works to emphasize the predicament each artwork depicts. These are presented as a catalyst for conversation, allowing people to interpret their own meaning of the work instead of an opinion being presented. Hopefully this creates a dialogue between viewers, which I consider more productive than stating a particular opinion.

I urge you to look at each artwork closely to help you understand how the different puzzle pieces of imagery work together. For example, Spenders (2023) depicts a group of people at a wine tasting blissfully ignoring the people panning for gold below. Behind them is a picture of the Sierra Pelada Incident in Brazil from the early 1980s, which was a completely unregulated gold rush that led to drastic ecological and humanitarian issues. The juxtaposition of the rich, ignorant of those laboring for a symbol of wealth, and separated by a structure that reads PILE ON, is not just about inequality but about he seemingly impossible divide between those two lifestyles.

I hope you enjoy the show and feel free to contact me with any questions or inquiries about the art or artmaking process.

Luke Gawron