Ki Smith Gallery proudly honored Sexual Assault Awareness Month with Eros, an exhibition of new works by Luke Ivy Price, raising over $1,500 to benefit The One Love Foundation.

 

One Love was founded in memory of Yeardley Love, a 22-year-old college student who was killed by her ex-boyfriend. Her family started One Love to educate young people on the differences between healthy and unhealthy relationships, empowering them to identify and avoid abuse and learn how to love better. In Eros, named for the ancient Greek god of love, Luke Ivy Price negotiates the sexual and the sexualized, exploring the power dynamics implicit in every intimate relationship.

 

Price’s works are about sexual feelings at their core and not the aestheticization of particular individuals. These works are not odalisques or pin-ups. The primary models for these works (albeit indirectly) are pornographic photographs obtained from internet sex blogs. The artist considers it essential that the work’s origins lie in the sexual rather than the sexualized. Lines and forms contained within his source materials are extracted and recombined. Upon finding shapes that he considers more a representation of sexuality than a particular person or body part, Price uses them as a vocabulary to create images.

 

The emotive use of color and dynamic employment of composition are a cornerstone of these works. They exhibit a zealous pursuit of significant form as well as a religious belief in an artwork’s ability to communicate autonomously. Media as commonplace as acrylic house paint and plaster are used in a way that highlights their materiality. In the work, the viewer will notice O’Keefe and Rothko as well as Pierre Bonnard and H.R. Giger. Perhaps she’ll even find traces of René Jules Lalique or Mary Cassatt. Price has comically described how, “Every canvas is an example of art theft on a scale too large to

prosecute.”

 

Price further explored the dichotomy of healthy and unhealthy relationships in a series of hand-embellished prints inspired by the story of Cassandra in Aeschylus’ classic tragedy Agamemnon, created specifically to benefit One Love. The artist’s original charcoal drawings on verso of each print employ the same formal language found in his paintings and sculptural works to depict the physical and emotional intimacy that can be achieved in a healthy romantic partnership.