Some of the best art is made out of the artist’s love for someone, not their love of making money. Take, for example, biracial Shawnigan Lake artist John Luna’s exhibit The Servant, which pays tribute to the artist’s late father’s legacy as well as showcasing Luna’s ability to showcase his talents through his art. And he uses his personal struggles as an epileptic as one of the inspirations to create his work.
“The idea of the seizure as this kind of state of abandon in which there is a loss of control and time stops is something that interests me from the perspective of the way that the work that I make has this quality of ruin or abandonment,” he says.
That’s not the only place inspiration comes from: Luna says that about five years ago he found a collection of his father’s writings.
“He was a very prolific writer and visual artist… I found a whole binder of writing that was fragments, poetic fragments where he was trying to [reconcile] his experiences in the war. This fascinated me in two different ways,” he says. “One was that there was much more violence and death described in the writing than I had ever been led to believe he had experienced… He did not reveal to us the amount of violence that he encountered and the amount of death he was involved in as a field medic… So that was fascinating to me, the violence.”
Luna was also fascinated by his father’s struggle to “capture certain kinds of memories that were very compressed in the way that memory compresses things and they were very fragmented, they were very broken up into little moments, episodes, the way that memory is.”
“One interesting side fact about that is that he had kept notebooks while he was a soldier but then when he was demobilized, when he left the service, all of his papers and his uniform and his possessions were destroyed, because they potentially can be infected by disease, by parasites when you’re serving in the front, in active combat,” he says. “So they were burned in front of him, so the writing on his part, I think, was some attempt to recover these fragmentary experiences.”
As for what he wants the audience to take away from The Servant, however, Luna says that’s not an easy question to answer (the connection of the name of the exhibit to Luna’s father and his war experience is that the word “sargent” comes from the French word for “servant”).
“I don’t think the artist can ever know what exactly is being passed on to the viewer and what the viewer will encounter,” he says. “I really subscribe to the idea that the viewer is a kind of author, as well, of the work and layers of viewers over time sort of inscribe the work in a new way into history; they make the history of the work.”
For Luna, it comes down to the relationship between himself and the art that he creates.
“In terms of what I experience and what is meaningful to me is like a token, like a part of something to hang on to from that creative experience,” he says. “So in terms of something to pass on from all of that, an emotional feeling is very important to me that that is passed on, even though when I am working, often I am not processing emotions, I’m not thinking about feelings. I’m really thinking about this very physical relationship to materials and this tremendous respect for the materials.”
The Servant
Until Saturday, October 9
Deluge Contemporary Art
deluge.squarespace.com