Artist Statement

Vessels hold. Cabinets protect. Any form with a lid or a door is an architecture, a shelter. Shift your scale to favor a bug’s, and dwellings multiply before your eyes. Luka Carter’s Desire Lines riffs on the potential of these spatialities, mashing up utilitarian forms to morph perspective and insist on a plenitude of habitats and simultaneities. Infused with an interspecies poetics and Carter’s righteous imagination, every nook yields ridges of possibility.

The show centers on a group of ceramic characters, Decoys, who enact trickery in their playful disjuncture between exterior surface and interior portal. They lure—posing, ecstatically, as the cacophonous creatures of a summer pond: turtles, frogs, butterflies, ladybugs, dragonflies, ducks. Buzzing and fecund, the symphony of their high-summer libidinal chants are routed through high chroma palettes and flamboyant patterns. From a distance, these creatures announce themselves as stable entities, seamlessly belonging to the pond’s ecosystem. Nothing unusual to see here!

But camouflaged clues begin to emerge, signaling inner dimensions that betray the coherence of the scene. Inter-locking ceramic bolts imply a constructed mechanics and tempt closer looking. Peaking through slits and seams, one finds there’s no layers of epidermis, no turtle skin beyond the shell, no interleaving of feathers, nor blood and guts. Rather, crevices give way to intimate enclaves and scenes of wild abandon. Inside the frog lies a dining room, where lovingly decorated walls surround a central table and chairs. Nearby, dirty laundry piles up within another bugged-out creature. Alongside these domestic notes, various kinds of wheels evoke movement and expansiveness: a gloopy car traverses a winding road against vibrant greenery inside the butterfly hive. A skate-boarding humanoid rounds the rim of a pool within the turtle. The Decoys treat surface as a site for confusion, so that these sacred other worlds can evade notice.