Double Feature

Though primarily a painter, Los Angeles artist Tom LaDuke has also produced black-and-white, liquefied graphite drawings of the natural world, as seen here in these two examples from 2017. Eerie and enigmatic, the drawings explore how translucency, opacity, reflection, and spatial ambiguities alter perception and understanding. And like his paintings, LaDuke composes his drawings using multiple layers of fragmentary information that suggest a separate distorted reality. LaDuke fashions these landscapes by fusing abstract and representational elements into what may initially resemble traditional forest scenes, but on closer examination offer ambiguous and conflicting visual information that challenges the viewer’s conception of reality. Here, he relies on the mind’s reactive tendency to search for familiar forms and objects within the darkened night scenes, but offers only the dim light of the moon to aid the eye in identifying represented reality.