07/05/2026
This spring we visited the studio of Luke Sarmiento at Acline Studios at Lake City, SC. Luke is a graduate of Cooper Union, but recently returned to South Carolina, and is a 2026 SC Arts Emerging Artist Grantee.
Luke’s work engages with the stylistic language of virtual worlds found in video games, the Internet, Asian cultures and economies, and the everyday. He draws upon the contemporary mythologies operating within these virtual worlds, navigating role-playing game fantasies from video games to the global market.
As part of Artfields 2026, Luke was commissioned to produce a new public work, Solarium. The work includes a 3D printed model of a speculative deep space probe that interacts with otherworldly objects, such as the Intergalactic Dandelion seed. The seed is rendered in Augmented Reality through the interface of a smartphone after scanning the QR code. The name, Solarium, refers to a celestial window, hinting at the phone screen as a key to unlock the multiverse.
