Don’t _____ Me, I ______ For _____
A solo exhibition of works by visiting artist Alex Lukas, who will be presenting in the Department's Visiting Artist Speaker Series on Monday, September 15, 2025.
In the Department of Art Lower Gallery
Center For the Arts, Room B45
On View: August 25 - October 17, 2025
Reception: TBD
Alex Lukas, Don’t _____ Me, I ______ For _____, 2025, custom flag, 5x8 feet
Artist Statement:
Examining the present through investigations of the recorded past and imagined future, my research and artistic studio practice exist at the intersection of documentary and fiction. Referencing speculative fantasy alongside quotidian roadside Americana, my drawings, prints, books, sculptures, and audio collages interrogate broadcasts across time, multiple forms of the souvenir, and various methods for the dissemination of public text. Focusing specifically on memorial language, post-apocalyptic fiction, municipal communiques, and political graphics, I appropriate, reimagine, and reinterpret language to tell new stories. Through transcription, alteration, and other means of "re-broadcast," my work chronicles and augments shared experiences in an effort to question historical narratives and subvert dominant notions of place. These creative inquiries manifest as a diverse range of studio projects, printed publications, and curatorial initiatives. From an ongoing series of fanzines documenting hyper-local, unsanctioned public name-writing traditions, to Arduino-driven light sculptures and experimental exhibition platforms, my work examines the malleability of history and the fallibility of memory, exploring an expansive set of strategies for the distribution of narrative.
Exhibition Statement:
Don’t _____ Me, I ______ For _____ continues Lukas' investigation into print-on-demand graphics with a new series of custom printed flags, focused on the phrase "Don't blame me. . .". Popularized in 2020 after Trump's loss to Joe Biden, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, "Don't blame me, I voted for him" or "Don't blame me, I voted for her" flags were preemptively available online. Here, the gendered phrase remains both ambiguous and specific, given Harris' historic candidacy.
Alex Lukas has spent the past several years scouring Amazon (and more recently, Alibaba), cataloging and downloading the graphics posted by vendors in their online advertisements for "custom printed flag." While innocuous at first glance, a deeper dive into these ad's default images reveals a troubling pattern: a subtle (and not-so-subtle) iconography design to appeal to the political right. This visual coding transforms the flag from a representation of shared ideals into an endlessly personalizable manifestation of a much-mythologized rugged individualism. For a recent solo exhibition at Interloc in Thomaston, Maine, Wide Scenarios for Indoor & Outdoor, Lukas output over two dozen Amazon advertisements for "custom printed flag" on custom printed flags. While some images required simple reformatting, other low-resolution images require meticulous recreation as vectorized graphics before printing. This ongoing body of work questions how technological advancements, global marketplaces, and online image generation have facilitated an ideological drift in the medium of print from an asset for the activist left to a tool for the right to refute democratic ideals.
The Artist:
Alex Lukas was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and raised in nearby Cambridge. With a wide range of influences, Lukas’ practice focuses on the intersections of place and human activity, narrative, and history. His fieldwork, research, and production reframe the incidental and the monumental through intricate publication series, sculptures, drawings, prints, audio collages, and experimental curatorial platforms. Lukas’ work has been exhibited widely and is included in the collections of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Kadist Foundation, the MIT List Student Lending Art Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Library of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst other institutions. He has been awarded residencies at The Bemis Center for the Arts, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, and the Kohler Arts/Industry program and was recently named one of the University of California Regents’ Humanities Faculty Fellows in support of his most recent curatorial project, Public Texts: A Californian Visual Language, a multi-faceted exhibition and public art initiative presented at the AD&A Museum in the spring of 2025. Lukas graduated with a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and received his MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. He is an Associate Professor of Print and Publication in the Department of Art at the University of California Santa Barbara.
Sold by WJF Custom, 2024
Dye-sublimation print (unique)
36” x 60”