Precious Armour
ARTISTS
Lucas Chemotti & Ben Barbetta Thompson
ON VIEW
May 9-23, 2025
SUMMARY
Known Studio and Hardel are excited to present Los Angeles-based photographer and director Lucas Chemotti, and UK-based artist and art director Ben Barbetta Thompson in “Precious Armour”. The mixed media exhibition explores themes of protection, permeability and preservation. Through individual works by each artist and collaborative sculptural pieces, the show sees each artist coming to their own conclusions to the immediate question a looming billboard proposes— “What is precious and what needs protection?”
ARTISTS
Lucas Chemotti (b. 1993, California) is a Los Angeles–based artist working as a photographer and director. Focusing on a non-narrative structure in his use of multimedia, images, video, and text, his work is marked by an expressive poetic tone. Broad themes of life and death, freedom and protection, are shown in a direct manner. With a background in commercial fashion image-making, his work utilizes the same tools—bringing them into a separate context.
Ben Barbetta Thompson (b. 1993, Sheffield, UK) is a multidisciplinary artist and art director living and working in Manchester, UK. His practice predominantly focuses on process-based printmaking, with an output incorporating photography, painting, and sculpture. In pursuit of integrating photography and painting in tense, lustful, and at times volatile manner, Barbetta Thompson creates works exploring ceremony and deep-rooted human rituals. Walking a tightrope between original photography and archival references from bygone eras of the media onslaught, repeatedly rebirthed through heavy printmaking practices, purposefully done to shield fragments of himself in the work underneath a safety blanket of texture. Familiar enough to resonate, but distorted enough to provoke.
