The Art Gallery ASHES/ASHES is having a spring show and you should go see it. The artist’s name is Luke Libera Moore, and the show is called God-Chunk: Chronoplex from April 14 to May 21, 2023. The gallery is near the Two Bridges neighborhood of Manhattan at 56 Eldridge Street.
These sculptures are large, smooth and hairy. They look very much like an amoeba in one sculpture, or maybe similar to an automatic massage robot, with a typewriter for a head. Let’s first talk about biomorphism, then some ideas about Pharoah Punk.
Biomorphism in art was an early 20th century wave of artists who made paintings, and especially sculptures, with rounded, organic shapes. They were reacting to certain minimalist and engineering tendencies in artists such as Leon Polk Smith and Piet Mondrian. My favorite of these early guys is Henry Moore, but my other favorite biomorphism guy is Isamu Noguchi, who was decades later. Noguchi did not spend his entire career with biomorphism, and his contributions are often humorous, if not ironic. You know, take a really high sculpture and round up.
The second idea actually is quite a stretch.
Chrono Chunk’s blue and gray sculpture reminded me of the show Stargate. When I got home, I couldn’t shake the idea of technology in Ancient Egypt. There is a whole genre of science fiction that we might call Pharoah Punk.
Punk science fiction novels have been around since the 1980’s, and I think William Gibson’s 1984 Neuromancer is a pretty good example, if not the first Cyberpunk book. Cyberpunk as a genre is the bundle of themes and motifs of all those gritty, futurist noire movies and video games, like Bladerunner. And each of the Atom Punk, or Steam Punk have these worlds and objects in those worlds.
Got it? So Pharoah Punk would be our set of any show that has objects, ideas, and motifs including:
- Ancient Egyptians having extraordinary technology;
- Ancient Egyptians meeting aliens;
- Certain colors and fashion ideas;
- Lots of overlap or none of 1, 2, & 3;
- Among others;
Example list: I’m purposely not doing a web search on this, although I did think of the new Shazam movies, the Black Adam movie, Thundercats, the Protoss from Starcraft, Apocalypse in X-Men, the Avatar movies a little bit, and this super awkward Mummy 1990’s cartoon, Mummies Alive!
Jacob Goldbas is a construction worker and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He attended North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. In 2013, he won the Washington, DC Jewish Community Center Fall Literary Festival Essay Contest Honorary Mention Award.
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