Born in 1983 and raised in Olympia, Washington, Luke Kempton Williams is a queer multi-disciplinary artist whose practice includes photography, video and sculpture. He lives and works between New York City and the Oregon Coast.
Growing up in a highly restrictive religious home, Luke spent the majority of his childhood exploring the woods, where he found solace and freedom. As a young man, adult books stores, truck stops and logging roads were the formation of his queer identity. These working-class symbols became not only signifiers of a familiar culture but also turned into fetishized objects of desire. For him, there was a duality in their meaning, one of profound respect for industrial tools and machinery, and men who would gather in bars and tell stories of their escapades; and the eroticism of this hyper-masculinity contrasted with the taboo of homosexuality. He gravitates to subjects that reflect his journey as a queer man from a blue-collar family. The images he takes are a meditation on his identity and queerness. He uses composition, soft focus, and colored gels to emphasize the seclusion, intensity and dream state of his homoerotic desires.
Luke Williams depicts what he sees as his United States. United in its states of struggle and hope as a nation but also the integration of his homosexuality and the perceived antithesis of queerness in blue collar culture. His photographs draw attention to and survey objects of personal note, often disparate or disconnected but linked through progressive sequences that induce cinematic storytelling. Each image though powerful on its own serves to amplify the arching themes of his narratives. Luke explores the relationships between identity, masculinity, and his homosexuality, to digest the cognitive dissonance of perception and reality between these subjects.
He is the founder and publisher of the magazine Cave Homo, which focuses on queer creativity and inclusion. It expresses an alternate outlook on LGBTQIA+ life, influences, identity and culture, different than the image of the community portrayed in media and advertising. Cave Homo serves as a beacon to those who don’t feel they fit within the confines of traditional queer archetypes and offers a fresh crop of artists, performers, musicians, writers, photographers and other creative outsiders to encourage, validate, and inspire Queer freedom, pride and excellence.
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