NYAB Event - Luke Diiorio “Never Stop Improving”

Luke Diiorio “Never Stop Improving”

Robert Blumenthal Gallery

This event has ended.

luke diiorio presents a site specific installation in three dimensions, and a little bit in two dimensions. The artist has constructed framed walls, but has left out many key ingredients, such as drywall, or plasterboard or wall board or gypsum board or LaGyp™ or anything like that, that would further constitute a functioning wall. Some of the segments are simply the bare frame, while some have some plywood attached (prior we said there was no actual ‘wall’ but this stuff is very thin, you wouldn’t really use it like you would drywall, or MDF or even thicker cut plywood. It’s so thin. ) Others have large format photograph prints attached. The source for these photographs is the actual gallery space in which the works are installed. It’s pictures of the gallery.

This show is entitled Never Stop Improving, and on the surface it’s about this whole DIY mode of working, incorporating an aspect of labor and common building materials within an art practice, but it’s also about walking backwards into this idea, and really accepting these structures as non-art objects. The experience of building standard 4 X 8 wood (typically stronger for residential) and metal (typically for office, commercial space) walls, framed out with standard 16 ‘on center’ studs, is important for maintaining a certain tempo and dumbness. This phase of the work takes place in the studio. If this phase had a title it would be called something like Let’s Just Get This Done or Since There are Twelve Frames to Make, I Bet We Can Get Eight of Them Put Together Today and Finish the Remaining Four by Lunchtime Tomorrow. So it took about a week or so to knock all these frames together. Again, it’s a crucial step because then later there is friction between labor/non-art objects and composition/art environment. Once it enters the gallery, the work goes to work.

And standing alone in the other room of the gallery is a constructed wall that has been cut and folded back onto itself. This maneuver is both an extension of the show’s installation and a nod to the artist’s painting practice, creating a physical image from a flat surface. Transforming the structure in this way makes it a more complete object but also it now officially eliminates the possibility of it ever being a functioning wall. The bare frames in the other room suggest “Hey, we were going to be walls for this basement we are finally renovating, but now we are a show in this gallery…” but this folded wall is much more like “I was always going to be this thing. I just had to be made out of something.” The spine is both the neck and the tail.

Luke Diiorio (b. 1983) graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2013. He will be included in upcoming shows at ltd Los Angeles, Anat Ebgi and Brand New Gallery in Milan.