Objects and their Fields / Everything is Present Tense (by Michael Lawton)

Luke Drozd asked me to write a text to accompany his solo show at York College Gallery which is reproduced below. Details of the exhibition:

Luke Drozd - Everything Is Present Tense
York College Gallery
1st September - 27th September

Evening opening and drinks: Thursday 13th September, 5-7.30pm.

A while ago I was listening to the song ‘The Mercy Seat’ and it put me in mind of Luke’s work. I can’t remember if it was the scratchy muffled chant of Nick Cave’s original or the stately sonority of Jonny Cash’s cover but I’m not sure that this is important; whichever it was, it seems like an odd association and I remember it did at the time. Odd that my mind summoned Luke’s work from this song, from either Cave or Cash, different generations of confused Christian boys fascinated by the contradictions of man, bloody drama, heavy skies and brooding romance. I see them as embodying a kind of burlap-sack realism, a world away from the assemblages, sculptures, found colours and joyful doodling of Luke Drozd.

I can remember the passage, it’s from the first verse:

‘I began to warm and chill 

To objects and their fields,

A ragged cup, a twisted mop

The face of Jesus in my soup

Those sinister dinner meals,

The meal trolley's wicked wheels,

A hooked bone rising from my food

All things either good or ungood’

It makes more sense when written out, for one I can well imagine Luke making all these things, even using them in his work; it reads like a detailed media list for one of his sculptures. I can imagine him telling me he bought a packet of soup because it had a picture of Christ on it. I can actually imagine him making a Mercy Seat, and to be overly literal he warms to objects and their fields as he chooses and arranges them for his work.

More importantly there is the sense of equivalence in this list; ‘all things either good or ungood’. Materials used despite their heritage, in a practice where everything becomes equal and has its materiality interrogated via making. As viewers we are expected to make the links for ourselves and if we can’t find them we look at the elements for what they are and for what they have become.

And actually this equivalence makes this incongruous coupling of a song about frying on the electric chair with this artwork; sometimes elegant, sometimes beautiful, sometimes sophisticatedly belligerently stupid, appropriate, (in its way it is quite fitting.)

Today tags like sacred and profane no longer seem useful, anything might inspire devotion or offend, everything is equivalent; it is about how it is used. Everything is present tense.