1
2
3
4
5
6
“While Wilde ponders wistfully; “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars,” Luts has chosen to crane his neck just over the curb to find galaxies closer to home; the splatterings of chewing-gum that decorate the city pavement. His series Constellations – a uniform series of large c-type prints – starts by documenting the topography of gum-bombed footpaths.
Luts opens the lens on this squalid micro-history of discarded moments, focusing underfoot and in detail on that most squalid place of forgotten dreams; the urban sidewalk.
When we think of the stellar constellations, we tend to refer to a human history replete with dreams, musings and desires projected upon the cosmos. These schemes drawn across the night sky have told and retold the lives of peoples throughout millennia.
In Constellations, Luts playfully takes charge of this universe and visits it in the late night urban alleyway, asking us to shed our stargazing romance for a second and witness that sky spat out on the pavement, in high definition colour. With titles like ‘Wrigley’s Belt’ and ‘Freedents Cross’ Luts turns a comedic mirror on this fascination with the great unknown to ponder a world usually deemed less fit to hold the answers.
The patterns Luts finds in the apparently random dispersion of gum show a scheme that could just as easily be threaded with a join-the-dot Trident, Orion’s Belt or Big Dipper, carrying with them the tales of other worlds. Luts has chosen this most humble and whimsical of subjects to talk about chaos and design.
If we take it that each of these spat out globs of gum, slowly trampled into the footpath, are a decaying residue whose placement only represent a collection of independent thoughtless expulsions, why should we think more of those greater bodies adrift in the night sky? Surely these houses chart a microcosm of that same story.
As William Burroughs had it, “A trillion years ago a giant dripped gobs of oil from his finger. We are but one of these drops on our way to the floor.”