Alan Luna lives and works in Los Angeles.
Luna makes photographs, simulations, and digital positives about inheritance, belief, and the photographic canon. Their work begins from the desire to claim a lineage that did not make room for them, and so must be remade in their own image.
Their works often look like photographs, and sometimes are.
Working between computer graphics, large-format 4×5 photography, scanning, and printmaking, Luna treats photography less as a record of the world than as a structure for imagining it. Earlier works used the virtual camera to fabricate a speculative counter-archive of metates, volcanic stone, museum artifacts, ruined modernisms, and impossible survey documents. More recently, Luna has returned to the world with a view camera, photographing border landscapes, vitrines, and house museums.
Born and raised in San Diego and Tijuana, Luna received a B.A. in Studio Art and Art History/Criticism from UC San Diego. Their work has been written about in Artforum and Hyperallergic, and has been exhibited at La Plaza Projects, the former San Diego Art Institute, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Southwestern College Art Gallery, Mandeville Art Gallery, and Bread & Salt San Diego.
They are a Post-Classical Mexican.