This Friday, Oct. 12, Jameson Modern hosts an opening of a solo show of Di Luzio’s fascinating digital imagery, which he calls time-based paintings. These moving images are composed of numerous layers of video played at variable speeds in a collage-like format. Some of his works even have the feel of a Rorschach inkblot test, as mirror-like images waver on either side of a central figure.
“I’m not just making video art, I’m trying to make a connection to painting,” Di Luzio says. “In the late ‘90s, I was having a very successful career as a painter. I was selling lots of paintings and getting them in prominent collections.”
But once he completed one of his large-scale, narrative paintings, and it slipped away to a private collection, Di Luzio began to yearn for these images he’d never see again. Around the same time he became intrigued by the potential of video as a medium.
“I used to make these complicated, colorful, narrative paintings, but people wouldn’t see the narrative,” Di Luzio says.
So he began to contemplate the visual language we use to convey stories in our modern world, essentially media like film and television. This realization led him to explore the video medium and eventually adopt it as his preferred method of creating art.
“Ten years ago video looked digital,” he says. “Now we can finally make images that don’t look like traditional video art of the ‘80s and ‘90s.”
This groundbreaking exhibition, which is supported by University of Maine in Orono, where Di Luzio is a professor, features five LCD screens, two plasma screens, a few Mac Minis and a selection of archival digital giclée prints. One work, “Yes, There’s No Such Thing as Global Warming,” will be projected onto a block of ice during the opening reception. And once the ice has melted, the work will be gone.
These works are not films, but more like paintings that move. Di Luzio shoots the bulk of the images himself, only occasionally borrowing footage from friends or buying stock images. Then he works to weave all these disparate images together.
Anyone who saw the Light House projection on the Cousins Island power plant this summer is familiar with Di Luzio’s work. His art was selected as the winner in the 2005 Prague Biennial, and he was designated by Apple Computer as the Apple Distinguished Educator in the New Media program at UMaine. It seems clear that his success as a painter is following him as he moves to this new medium, tailor made for the 21st century.