frankluna

Astoria, New York

Born in El Paso, Texas, Frank Luna was not your average Tex-Mex kid.raised by a part time stunt man and a real estate agent, Frank learned early on that fulfilling work involved some element of risk. Having spent a good part of his youth taking strange picture of everyday scenes and object ... (More) Born in El Paso, Texas, Frank Luna was not your average Tex-Mex kid.raised by a part time stunt man and a real estate agent, Frank learned early on that fulfilling work involved some element of risk. Having spent a good part of his youth taking strange picture of everyday scenes and object around the house, manipulating the controls on an old--school Casio keyboards to create bizzarre sounds, and tuning in to the "music" of static and strains of garbled foreign tongue on his radio-Luna has always had a way of stumbling onto secret worlds through innocent misuse of technology and his natural attraction to the unfamiliar and unusual.Though he has always had a broad interest in all things creative, Luna narrowed his focus in college, earning in B.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Texas. Later, he forayed into film, gaining experience in production, video editing and motion graphics-which brought his attention back to visual means of expression. Seeking greater opportunity for profesional growth, Luna moved to new York City in 2004 to pursue work as a film editor and experiment more seriously with art. It was not long before he had discovered his own unique and utterly contemporary mode of expression, using a flatbed scanner.Mysterious and provocative, Luna's scanned images suggest characters, stories and hidden meanings. Though he insist there are few, if any, intentional message in the scans, the images are rich enough to invite interpretation and suggestive enough to inspire disquiting fascination. With uncompromising intimacy, Luna confronts the eye wiyh pare-gazing glimpses of flattened chicks, twisted noses, wet pressing lips, and indistinct hollows and curves-only to leave one hanging on the edge of the visible.A man as enigmatic as his portraits, Luna does not reveal much about how he achieves such dramatic optical effects-only that he uses an ordinary flatbed scanner and employs simple, albeit imaginative, props and techniques. More likely to emphasize what he does not to do, he gives more credit to the scanner than to himself. " People think that I Photoshop the hell out of the original image and apply loads of effect," he says. "But all I really do is crop [the image] and adjust brightness and contrast; nothing more." Freeing him from conventional artistic criteria associated with style, composition, and the subjective lens of personal experience, Luna seeks not a picture, but a moment. "No one knows what the final image will look like until the scan is complete...its like slowly driving by the site of a car wreck," Luna explains." You scan over the scene of tragedy, straining to see what happened. You can't help yourself. On some level, we want to see something injured and mangled," The driving-by-an-accident analogy may not be the most elegant one, but it aptly describes luna's scanning process-the light is the "observer" and the face, blurring into grotesque distortions, is the "accident". (Less)