Shana Lutker

Shana Lutker’s multidisciplinary practice focuses on the intersection between history and dream, memory and the subconscious. Psychoanalysis and the Surrealist movement in particular have provided rich territory for her conceptual investigations across sculpture, text and performance. Since 2012 she has compiled an eight-part history of the Surrealists’ numerous fist fights over matters of art and ideology, which she has interpreted in the form of installations and performances that reflect extensive factual research into the characters, artworks and material details of these incidents, as well as her subjective reactions to them. Each chapter references a particular altercation; for instance, an installation featuring plates melting like Salvador Dali’s clocks over the edges of a dais and a table bearing pink napkins climbing halfway up a wall alludes to a banquet in 1925 in Paris which descended into chaos and resulted in several arrests. Through manipulations of form, medium and scale, Lutker endows quotidian objects with an uncanniness that locates them in a hallucinatory space between language and thing, reality and the subconscious, truth and fiction, prompting fresh, unexpected perspectives.

Lutker was born in Northport, New York, in 1978. She received a BA from Brown University and an MFA from the UCLA School of Art in 2005. She presented installations from Le “NEW” Monocle at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. (following a 2014 Smithson Research Fellowship), Perez Art Museum Miami, Florida and the 2014 Whitney Biennial and a performance component at Performa 2013, New York. In addition, Lutker's work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally in Los Angeles, Zurich, Mexico City, Stockholm, New York, Cleveland, Houston, Lisbon, and San Francisco. She lives and works in Los Angeles, California.