Luke Parker’s “Sculpture” references Marcel Duchamp’s concept of the inframince: the imperceptible thresholds and gaps between things. Positive and negative, paper and photopaper, subject and object, sculpture and photograph become unstable categories. Parker’s newest exhibition occupies these spaces of transition, where one thing slips into another and intention becomes entangled with use.

Of the 17,098 photographs in Parker’s iPhone, 447 appeared when he entered the word “sculpture” into the Photo app search function. These algorithmically categorised photographs form his newest body of work. Often working within self-imposed parameters, Parker uses restriction as a generative framework, focusing attention while unsettling meaning.

‘Sculpture’ presents these iPhone photographs transformed into silver gelatin ‘contact’ prints. Through a sequence of translations, the original images are reversed, degraded and materially transformed. The resulting negatives appear uncanny in the truest sense of the word: both familiar and strange. Each stage introduces a loss or distortion, but also a movement towards materiality. What begins as an image on a phone becomes a photographic object. The process shifts the images between states – digital and analogue, positive and negative, image and object – until the photograph itself begins to occupy the territory of sculpture.

BIO

Luke Parker received a Bachelor of Arts (Communications) from the University of Technology Sydney in 1996, majoring in film and sound. Since then, his work as an artist has been presented in exhibitions at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the National Gallery of Victoria, Geelong Gallery, Gertrude Contemporary, the Centre for Contemporary Photography, the Museum of Australian Photography, Carriageworks, Artspace, the National Art School Gallery, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Murray Art Museum Albury, and Penrith Regional Gallery. He has also produced projects for numerous artist-run initiatives, including 55 Sydenham Road, Marrickville, where he served on the artist board from 2015 to 2018, and more recently, three projects for Sydenham International (2022-2024).