Painter Luke Rogers, who lives in Los Angeles, examines the nature of both water and control in his new exhibition Coughing in the Pipes. The title, drawn from Joan Didion’s 1977 essay “Holy Water,” actually describes the sound a well makes as it dries up. Rogers reinterprets this phrase as a quiet warning—a malfunction echoing within the system.
In Rogers’ paintings, water circulates within a network stretching from dams to household faucets, from Oroville to Antelope Valley. He draws a parallel between California’s massive pipeline systems for transporting water—what Didion called “plumbing on a grand scale”—and the sink in his own studio. This parallel serves as the guiding idea for the entire series: the blurring of boundaries between the micro and macro, the individual and the systemic, the domestic and the geopolitical.
The movement of water in the paintings transforms into the aesthetics of catastrophe. In the work Flood, the light patterns over an overflowing sink are not merely a domestic scene but a harbinger of larger collapse. Rogers’ works do not directly depict global warming, but they portray living amid drought, fire, and earthquakes as a distinctly Californian norm.
The artist’s formal approach eliminates hierarchies between objects. A dam and a pot, a pipeline and a washing machine hold equal importance. In Oroville, water falling from roofs is both part of an engineering system and a force of nature. In Concrete. Water. Dirt, the steam erodes both the surface of light and matter. Rogers’ palette oscillates between California’s bright daylight and the darkness of fire smoke; greens are sickly, yellows uneasy, surfaces tense.
The exhibition also reminds us how fragile the process of thinking through painting can be. Rogers strives to maintain control while simultaneously surrendering to the nature of the paint. The tension between finish and unfinishedness, illusion and material, is visibly present in every canvas. In this sense, Rogers evokes Courbet’s 1860s series “The Source of the Loue”; he constructs a narrative of nature born from the conflict between eye and hand.
Coughing in the Pipes unfolds in a universe where humanity’s desire to govern the world has become its own echo. As Didion wrote of the Hoover Dam: “When man disappears, the water continues to flow.”
In Rogers’ paintings, only this echo remains—the consequences of human action, now more enduring than humanity itself.
🖼️ Luke Rogers – Coughing in the Pipes
📍 Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles
🗓️ Ongoing until October 25, 2025
💬 Apartment No:26 Note
Rogers depicts California not as a landscape, but as an infrastructure.
Water is no longer the sound of life; it is the sound of the system. And that sound is coughing in the pipes.
