“I believe the most basic and immediate, over-arching visual aspect of my work could be described as a “perverse sheen”. That is to say, regardless of the particular subject matter of a single photograph, or my intent behind a given body of work, the “look” of gloss-coated morbidity pervades just about every aspect of my practice. This informs the content of my pictures, and vice versa.”

Photographer Luke Libera Moore is indeed definitive when it comes to the aesthetic of his work. By utilizing techniques often found in commercial photography, from precise artificial lighting to stack-focusing, to colour-oriented composition, he builds highly detailed and enticing images that usually belies their inviting façade, and strands the viewer in an uncanny picture-world.

The content of Libera Moore’s images range from small scale detail shots, to images which include lots of unattached and unrelated objects in various positions. He describes this as a process that blends still life and tableaux respectively, with the two having an essential parity in his work.

“The tableaux works develop a mise-en-scene, and the still life images of solitary objects become characters in this disintegrating fantasy of a life-world I have tried to build over the past two or three years. These two modes of pictorial representation serve an essentially cinematic function when they work together in sequence: The tableaux is a sort of “establishing shot” and the still life or close-up render a potential actor, agent, or cause directly addressing – confronting - the viewer.

I try to make these banal domestic objects have some kind of entrancing animism to them – to make them exude some uncanny force, and in turn provoke an almost extra-terrestrial sense of fascination from the viewer. This basic aim drives a lot of the decision-making processes within my work. I typically collect objects to photograph based on those criteria in conjunction with particular social meaning or use of said objects.

But of course the tableaux works have more going on in the picture than just a single object, they’re more about the internal interactions within the frame, these objects are chosen to build up the suggestion of event, a scene. Whereas the still life images are more immediate in their aim to both stupefy and fascinate the viewer, the tableaux works also connote a pseudo-narrative, the idea that ‘something has happened’ – more specifically in my case, that ‘something unknown has penetrated this constructed domestic fantasy’,” he explains.

Thus in this specific body of work, “Life-World, the underlying theme is this rather imprecise “something”.

“That something must remain vague- therein lies its power. Because when this spectral presence of the unknown seeps into a photograph – that medium we used to think was so assured in its description – it generates a creeping awareness of the fallibility of knowledge and representation. In short, it opens up to an experience of the sublime. Exploring contemporary sublimity and the gaping void beneath our collective fantasies, beneath representation and its established cannons - that is my paramount interest.”

Libera Moore’s images, through his chosen subject matter, photography techniques and colour constructions; pops of bright colour underscore a sense of artificially and hyper-stimulation, therefore diagnose and describe the world in which his images exist, and to which he invites his viewer. A world of pervasive sheen, symbolism, oddities, and above all, imagination.

Dive in.

http://lukeliberamoore.com

Words / Jamie-Maree Shipton