Todd Morman11/23 07:47 PM
Bonded Llama turned out to be a great little space, with lots of artist studios, a small front gallery and another one in the basement. Luke’s stuff was really good; I’d forgotten that he creates the scenes using photos he collages together for that fractured effect, and then paints over them. I like the ones where you can barely see the photographic elements best, but they come through to varying degrees in all of the pieces. He also adds sculptural elements - in the last image above, the ladder at the right is made of wire attached to the canvas. His new pieces are bigger, too, and the titles are great. He says his recent stuff includes images from the E.B. Bain Water Treatment Plant, which Greg Hatem bought a few years back and I guess is going to renovate, but in the meantime a bunch of artists have been invited to create work there - see http://www.bainproject.com/. We’ll hear a lot more about it before the show opens next May, but the E.B. Bain plant is probably worth a New Raleigh post on its own.
(Btw, Bonded Llama is neat but kinda hard to find, tucked at the end of a service road paralleling the west side of Capital between the two exits for Wake Forest Road. The Google Maps directions are awful; Mapquest was better. As you head north on Capital from Peace or Wade, make a left across southbound traffic on Capital to reach the service road. This would be after you pass the Wake Forest Road North exit and before the Wake Forest Road South exit. You’ll see the club ‘Reds’ at one end, Bonded Llama is all the way at the other end, past a couple of antique shops. Every building along that stretch is 1505 Capital, so the addresses don’t help.)
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