Lynn Tjernan Lukkas

Artist Statement

My work is about one of our most fundamental human drives, to understand our selves in relation to our world.  This has taken me from early altered photographic images culled from Art History and popular culture that explored questions of female subjectivity to more recent digital and interactive works that explore subjective human consciousness through metaphors of immersion, of space, and of time. My work explores formal and conceptual contradictions – embodying the ephemeral and the palpable, the miniature and the gigantic, the expansive and the intimate, presence and absence; the container and the contained, and interior and exterior. These dichotomies form the metaphors and poetic language of my creative work.

The visual and aural elements, film/video, installation, performance, human voice, sound, photography and interactivity are at times employed as stand alone forms and at times integrated into multimedia installation and performance works. Regardless of the end form, I am compelled by the lush visual beauty of the film and photographic image, they speak to my desire for sensory pleasure in my work and a tendency toward narrative or storytelling inherent in these indexical media. My interests in performance and voice are rooted in the subjective experience of the body, the voice (like the finger print) embodies personal identity, each person carries a unique vocal tambre; while performance and interactivity transform the the body from body as flesh/biology to body as place/site and body as self/agent/other.

Time is perhaps the most illusive element in media arts. In my most recent project, Sense of Time, I explore subjective experiences of time - memory, trauma, dreams, revery and estatic events. In order to research how we understand time I am conducting through video research interviews with several artists, scientists, psychologists, religious leaders, humanists, social scientists, and people from varied walks of life and cultural contexts including, among others, philospher/artist Adrian Piper, avant garde theater director and visual artist Jan Fabre, Butoh artist Eiko Atake and Chronobiologist Franz Halberg. The video interviews provide the research for a film/performance work which will premiere in the spring of 2008 and a book of essays based on interview excerpts.

In the summer of 2001, while on a New Media Co-production Residency at the Banff Centre, I began the development of a machine/body interface that maps the involuntary functions of the body (breath, heart rate, brain waves, muscle contraction, and eye movement) to images and sounds projected into installations spaces. These works of art reach beneath the surface of the body to the biological potentials and emotions that sustain life and form consciousness. “Respirae,” the first of the biosensor projects mapping the rate and rhythm of the user’s breath onto video images, as the user breathes so architectural scale images projected into the gallery subtly expand and contract.  By calling attention to the simple act of breathing this work inscribes the interior rhythms of the body onto the external environment. The visitor is contained within the flux and flow of images and sounds in the installation space, at the same time their body is also the container of their breath, of the chemical systems that make up their sense perceptions, emotions, and rational responses to the immediate environment.  “Respirae,” creates a metaphoric folding of the body into the external world and the external world into the body.

In 1998 I began the “Oculus Projects,” a series of art works that use a Global Positioning System (GPS) to locate my presence in time and space. I traveled to several geo-political sites where I marked my position on the globe, recorded my environment and enacted performances. The video footage, sounds, and GPS data I collected became the raw material for interactive installations, digital photographs, and video art works. I am interested in the potential of “off the shelf” digital technologies to function as poetic devices. I used the GPS unit as a mechanism to re-frame our understanding of time and space by suggesting a collapse of distant places into intimate experience and the expansion of intimate experience into distant locales.  I recently completed Oculus:  Yangtze and interactive installation at sites in Cape Town South Africa and Saint Louis Missouri.  In this piece I juxtaposed the immense and sublime landscape with the intimate experience of the viewer contained within the installation space. The GPS coordinates projected within the installation became the trace of my presence while collecting the images and sounds of the Yangtze River, and the mark of my absence within the final installation.

In many indigenous cultures, tactile and acoustic experiences are the primary sensate experiences.  In western culture, developed on the Indo-European plains, sight became the primary sensory experience necessary for survival and with that came the externalization of the self from its context. Additionally, Rational Philosophy, which took hold during the Enlightenment favors cognitive process over emotional processes. As a result, western technocratic societies in general, and the computer specifically, are often theorized as manifestations of sight as the dominant sense modality and rationality as the primary function of human consciousness. I am interested in turning this understanding of technology in on itself to create works of art that favor the biological and the emotional and that require the visitor to give their attention to their immediate experience. I enter into a unique collaboration with each visitor as a participant and with the mechanical apparatus to make interactive works of art that are perhaps more akin to the poetic structure of jazz improvisation where the performer interprets, alters, or completes the work of art. 

A friend recently remarked that “Art is the act of attention,” as such, my work asks the others to bring their attention to the moment, to their body, to their sensory experiences, and to their presence at a particular place and time.  In my film, video, installation, and performances the work the Art resides in the ongoing act of attention.

Lynn Lukkas was born (Lynn Carol Hambrick) on May 6, 1956 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She is the second of five children and the only daughter. Her tumultous and violent childhood formed the backdrop for much of her early and more recent art work exploring art, film, psychology and the neurobiology of trauma.

Lukkas had wanted to be an artist from a young age. But, it was Robert Maderich a co-worker and later husband and father to her daughter, who encouraged her to enroll in college and study art. Maderich, a young composer, offered her a glimpse into an alternative and counter-culture world of the late 1970's. Lukkas' daughter, Sarah Anne Maderich, was born on October 15, 1978 Lukkas and Maderich seperated in 1981.

Over the next few years while working as a waitress and raising her small daughter Lukkas worked toward a B.F.A.degree in Art at the University of Minnesota. In 1983 she left school, rented a loft in the Lowertown area of Saint Paul and began her career as a practicing artist. She joined the Saint Paul Art Collective and became a regular member of the Lowertown arts scene. In 1985 she completed her studies and was awarded a B.F.A. degree, the first and only person in her family to have gone to college.

In September 1985 Lukkas left Minneapolis for the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence Rhode Island where she was accepted into the M.F.A. program in Photography. Sarah stayed in Minnesota with her father during the school year and spent summers in Rhode Island. The three year seperation of mother and child proved to be profoundly difficult for both and would deeply effect their personal lives and relationship in the years to come.

Lukkas earned her M.F.A. in Photography from R.I.S.D. in 1988 and returned to her daughter in Minnesota where she had also secured her first teaching appointment at Saint Johns University in Collegeville Minnesota. The next several years 1988 - 1995 were spent building her art practice and professional career and forming a more stable and secure environment for her young daughter and while also building the photography and new electronic media program at Saint Johns University. It was during this period that Lukkas also began traveling internationally, a passion that continues to be influencial to her art practice. In 1992 Lukkas met her second husband, John Hasselberg, was awarded an N.E.A. Fellowship in Photography and was offered a full time teaching position. In early1993 she purchased her first home.

In 1995 Lukkas accepted an appointment as Assistant Professor of Art at Oberlin College and again left Minnesota. Her husband and daughter stayed in Minneapolis and Lukkas commuted between Ohio and Minnesota. During this time she was awarded several fellowships including A Bush Foundation Artists Fellowship enabling her to take a year off of teaching and return to Minnesota to focus on her creative interests and be with her family.

After a difficult and tumultous five year attempt to build a new program in digital media without a commitment from the college administration Lukkas was denied tenure at Oberlin College. In the fall of 1999 she spent three months traveling in China, Vietnam and Tibet then returned to Minneapolis to complete a collaborative project with Susana DiPalma at the Walker Art Center and to finish her final semeter of teaching at Oberlin College.

In the spring of 2000 Lukkas returned to Minneapolis and accepted a newly created position in Electronic Art in the Department of Art at the University of Minnesota. In January 2001 Lukkas filed for divorce from he second husband siting irreconcilable differences. In Septermber 2001 she was appointed Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Art which she served as until 2004. She was awarded tenure in 2003 and currently holds an appointment as Associate Professor of Art in the Time and Interactivity Area of the Department of Art. Lukkas' post-tenure activities have focused on completing several artworks from the Biosensor Series and the Oculus Series, providing service to several UMN initiatives including the new Interdisciplinary Program in Collaborative Arts and producing two major national and international symposia.

Lynn Lukkas has travelled to several countries including Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, Czechoslavakia, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Greece, Turkey, China, Japan, Tibet, Vietnam, Tunisia, Egypt and South Africa. In 2005 Lukkas married and currently lives in Minneapolis with her husband, opera singer Peter Frenz. Sarah lives nearby and is completing an undergraduate degree at the College of Saint Catherine's. Lynn and Peter are planing upcoming trips to Berlin, Antwerp, Italy and hope to live in Europe in the future.