Dark side of the Luna
The whiz-whirring electronic sounds of Pink Floyd’s On The Run menaces the otherwise welcoming living room, an artful array of playful Kartell chairs, books piled on the floor, and a large heart-shaped mirror deliberately fallen on the shag carpet. It’s undoubtedly the home of an artist, with paintings and works-in-progress leaning against the walls in layers, and photographs, postcards and other ephemera strung up in string lights. “Pink Floyd’s the only thing I’ve been listening to these days,” Nikki Luna says. “‘Animals’ is my favorite.” Rather than risk a Floydian slip talking about a band whose album I only downloaded because the Judy Garland movie was shown on TV, I inquire about the various art facts strewn around the room, remnants of exhibits past, prototypes of future ones.
The gun on the table between us is particularly loaded — it’s a sample of the now-widely known installation piece “Unmentionables” that was auctioned off at Sotheby’s in Hong Kong for the tidy sum of US$12,019. The yellowish resin cast was laid with lace, creating a sculpture whose violent masculinities have been softened, doilied over with antique lace from a mother or grandmother. Next to it, a sister shotgun in lingerie black. I imagine a stylized movie of fash assassins, but Luna had other, bigger concepts in mind. She asks me what I thought the catalogue note meant when it said, “That these lace guns come in glass boxes, all pointing to the left is not an accident…Luna figuratively points back the smoking barrel to the feminists who wove this symbol in the mass psyche.”
Oh, these art writers. I never know what they’re saying. Or necessarily agree with the meaning they imbue a piece.
Luna is not a feminist, or a leftist, or a man-hater, nor is she the opposite of those. Women’s issues are dear to her because she is a woman. But it is clear that she thinks about these issues in a deep way that emanates from her core outwards. Through art, she uses her own body and its experience with the daily injustices of being a woman to address and call attention to other women, who may or may not ever afford to own or create their own art. She always draws from the home, the hearth of the matter. It is the art of the domestic, the daily lived, the singularly personal — chat conversations saved over three years, unsent text messages pieced during ruptures in routine, drafts and overdrafts, carefully worn and worded memories. These she embeds in embroidered curtains, on shadow wordplay on walls, in blank bibles of what “You said.”
“I like dealing with things which stem from a unit, and that is home. No one has to have a husband, wife or kids to realize things,” Luna explains. “First of all, you come from a home. You already have that unit, and you stem from there to the community, then to society.”
Luna interacts with a lot of society’s women and children through her non-profit called StartART, a place where she grounds herself and considers art from a perspective different than that of a gallery. Working with organizations like Salinlahi, she goes to urban poor communities and uses art as a tool for therapy and communication. After the Maguindanao massacre, she traveled to the area to work with the kids of the victims. “I’ve never felt more little in my entire life. You’re dealing with five- to eight-year-olds who suddenly lost their loved ones. And it was political, and you can’t explain it, and they can’t explain it,” Luna describes. Creative activities like drawing and making finger puppets helped the kids express their emotions in a non-verbal way. “It was hard, I thought they wouldn’t open up. But at the end of the day, they were fighting over the attention. They all wanted to answer, they all wanted to share.”
Despite the intimately autobiographical nature of her art, Luna is, ironically, resolutely private. There are no identifying features in her pieces. Faces are turned, names are withheld, and even the most personal of photographs become a kind of everywoman. “It’s not just about me,” she insists. “That’s why there are 20 guns. I could’ve made just one big gun.” Instead, there are always other people’s stories —there’s the lace gathered from the fraying slips and blouses of a wide strata of women, and, for an upcoming Silverlens SLab show, the broken eggshells she’s been collecting from homes where people serve other people.
For Luna, this inclusion of other women in her work makes it meaningful, more than just a bunch of pretty ideas she gets in her head. “I have a social responsibility as an artist. Art shapes society and culture,” Luna says. “That’s why it’s always different per country — it shapes it, makes you believe it. The things you believe in actually choose you.”
