Luke Murphy

Luke Murphy (b. 1963, Boston, MA) constructs digital paintings and sculptures using commercial LED light panels, suggesting both the ubiquity and the surprising vulnerability of our digital world. 

Liberating individual LED panels from the rigid parameters of the flat screen, Murphy reimagines them as ostensibly free-standing and wall-mounted sculptures yet the geometrically abstract code that flows over these fragmented screens evokes systems-based, conceptual, and even intuitive approaches to art, so much so that Murphy calls some his works “sculptures of paintings.”

Murphy, who worked as a coder for many years, is interested in forcing these commercial digital systems to evoke shared human responses such as the comfort of standing around a campfire or the awe of watching a conflagration burn. He explains: “In my early practice, I tried at times to graph the ineffable and unmeasurable (home, pain, suffering, love, happiness etc.) because I like to wade around in the tension between the authority of systems built by humans and their impossible indisputably human content.” In his LED sculptures, Murphy takes this impulse further, mapping and wrapping code around everyday materials, mining the stress that connects technological systems built for ideal user experience for the cracks and glitches in our digital utopia. 

His illuminated moving sculptures can resemble or even incorporate defunct signage, collapsed grids, creaky ladders, or steel studs that glitter and blink, compelling the viewer to watch the code flow across the broken surfaces in endlessly pleasing random patterns, which at the same time, deflect attention away from the broken and sometimes sad systems that support them.

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