Luke Butler

Go back in time, before there was TiVo, before there was Internet, back when you relied on the TV Guide to soak up the smallest shreds of TV trivia. Imagine being a kid again, on the shag carpet of your parents’ wood-paneled den, wasting away the long summer days indoors. The fan’s blowing as hard as it can, pushing hot air around, and you’re propped up on your elbows waiting patiently for Star Trek reruns to start. “Space,” finally, “the final frontier.” And for the next 30 minutes you’re somewhere else entirely, sucked into the set, and you wish you could just live in there forever, with these characters you’ve come to love. They’ve been with you through so many hard times, and you with them. Especially the handsome, severe (but secretly sensitive, and somehow sexy) Captain James Kirk.

Painter Luke Butler calls Kirk “a model of vulnerability … a most stout and reliable figure,” and notes “if you have watched enough TV, you know this to be true.” In Butler’s Enterprise series, we’re granted the chance to linger in the golden fantasy-land of Kirk, his deep space compatriots, and the suave ubermensch buddy cops of Starsky and Hutch, frozen in moments of strong emotion, tender affection and terse action. All unnecessary elements have drifted away, as Butler isolates these beautiful, irreplaceable cathode-ray men, amidst a universal expanse of resounding gray silence.

Along with Future Shipwreck favorite– and fellow TV-devotee– Desiree Holman, Butler sits on the roster of San Francisco’s tremendously rad Silverman Gallery. His other bodies of work include a haunting tribute to “The End” and a creepy-funny series of porno-political collages depicting 1970s world leaders luxuriating in the nude.