top of page

Theo Luna


Theo Luna is an installation, video, light-based, and performance-based artist who has won major awards at festivals hosted by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Berlin Art Institute. Recent exhibitions include a solo feature at Western Pole Gallery in Chicago as well as collective shows at School of Art Institute, Vagabond Arts, and Site Gallery in Chicago and Universität der Künste Berlin.



Using light-based projections, shaped neon lights, texts, and performance, Theo Luna’s work is not only interdisciplinary but also highly communicative. The viewer will often find incomplete phrases or partial shapes within the art, which convey a sense of fragmentation both socially and metaphorically. Sometimes in the works, tunnel-like shapes of light will focus on a central composition, much like a spotlight on a theatrical stage or an allegory of multiple dimensions via the Twilight Zone. We will often find the use of red light within the works to communicate an overwhelming sense of a threatening environment, intensity, and anger or fear.



The use of flashing or moving light in some of the works, be they performances or installation, conveys a hypnotic trance and sometimes followed by ominous electronic music. Strategic darkness from flashes and containment reveals an experience of horror and dramatic theatre. Within these various installations and performances, the viewer may feel they are traveling through time as their surrounding environment becomes displaced by focused tunnels of light and conceptual narrative. The ideas being based on lucid experience of ephemerality and movement. In these works, the viewer becomes lost in time, space, and language. With semiotics, Theo Luna begins a translation of personal experiences which became exhaled into mysterious visual substance for the viewer to solve a puzzle. Constant asymmetrical shapes of light illuminate the room with concepts based on manipulating optical illusion based on immense distortion and interference. Much like the electrical interference in the beginning of the video game Morrowind, the viewer is left in a state of mysterious conjuration of enchanted environments. A vast unknown for us to explore and gain new experiences through this art.



Is There Anybody Out There (pictured above) contains a brilliant projection of texts and shaped light to the crashing waves of the shore at night. The howling of the wind and conversations in the background seem to offer a soundtrack to these illuminating words. With a sense of fleeting isolation, the audience is left in the dark, literally, against a sea of words. We interpret the language based on the value of identity and human life, conveying a deeply evocative work.



Theo Luna represents a great standard in advancing conceptual principles in experimental contemporary art. With a thoroughly integrative approach and willingness to push psychological boundaries, the artist pressed forward on realms of light, distortion, and incomplete shapes to have us ponder upon the purpose of contemporary identity. These works are highly evocative, based in emotion, provoking the viewer to respond to the flashes, darkness, and fierceness of color and vivid performance. Theo Luna has an intense imagination and a talent for moving audiences beyond their comfort zones and personal boundaries through intense light, sound, and motion.

































bottom of page