Luke Van H

Luke van H (b. 1995) grew up in London, Ontario, graduated from Ontario College of Art and Design University in 2019, and lives and works in Toronto. In the last five years, Van H has crafted a unique visual vocabulary of garden imagery to explore the idea of a virtual garden - a place where anything can happen. The integration and separation of technology from everyday life and nature is an ongoing interest in Van H’s work. Van H combines various digital and material processes to make paintings that inhabit a shifting space somewhere closely-adjacent to our own realities.

About the Series:

This little birdies’ practice involves reconfigurations and transformations of a variety of stock images, screenshots of online videos, 3D models and other Internet detritus. These images, filtered through a love of gardening and built up in Photoshop, find synthesis in works that inhabit both the physical and digital space. Van H’s recombinant strategy produces acrylic airbrush paintings that concretize and assert digital images into material existence through a form of mimicry.  The intention of the process is to capture the essence of and materialize digital drawings with the works functioning as a fulcrum between the two antagonizing worlds. 

Van H combines various digital and material processes to make paintings that inhabit a shifting space somewhere closely-adjacent to our own realities. Each painting operates as a portal into the larger body of work and ever-expanding garden. Individual pieces can be understood as icons of devotion and stopping points in one’s pilgrimage through the garden.

The paintings are produced in a series of meticulous, sequential steps, using the digital drawing as a map. Thus the object becomes a distorted duplicate of its digital originator. Spawned from a digital plan. Shut out from its other pixelated half. Subjected to the deterioration of time and space.