bobby allan lukas jr / bobbylukas@bobbylukas.com / Mills College MFA, 2010
I work with materials culled from the landscape and gleaned from my life. My work is small and doesn’t leave a big footprint. I want to be able to put it in my pocket and hit the road. I want to be able to make my work anywhere I am, from what I find there. It’s a game - here is what I have, now what can make?
I am attracted to the tangibility of the materials, their three-dimensional physical reality and their connection to the concrete world. I like the rawness of found material - the weathered and isolated fragment, and their "diamond in the ruff" characteristics.
These works come from the environments that I live in and travel through. They are a document of my life - where I go, what I do, what I acquire, what I select, and what I turn down. In editing our cultures' detritus I create totems, cairns, piles, and anti-monuments. I am a lazy outsider alchemist turning trash into a new form that I obsess over and hold precious.
The sculptures grow out of post-apocalyptic necessity as well as a romantic mythology. The objects I make exist at the fringes of culture, a kind of reverse manufacturing, a stash of bindle stiffs, packages, tools, and toys - salvaged fetishes from consumer culture - trinkets, tchotchkes and treasured objects.
There is more work to be seen at…