Tristan Duke is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores light, perception and our relationship to the environment. He builds many of his own tools and processes and often works directly with scientists. From 2010 to 2023 he worked with the artists Lauren Bon and Rich Nielsen in the Optics Division of the Metabolic Studio, a collective project that treated photography as a land-based medium and social practice.
In 2022 Duke sailed to Svalbard in the Arctic, where he made working camera lenses from glacier ice and used them to photograph the glaciers. This began his ongoing project Glacial Optics. He later turned the ice-lens camera on wildfires in the American West and visited climate science laboratories, where he laid ancient ice cores directly on large sheets of photographic paper to make photograms. SITE Santa Fe showed the project in his first major solo exhibition (2024 to 2025), and Radius Books published the book Glacial Optics in 2025, with essays by Lucy R. Lippard, Mark Cheetham, William L. Fox and Brandee Caoba and a foreword by Michael Govan.
Duke has also developed holographic technologies. His hologram album artwork earned him a CLIO Award, and he has received the LACMA Art + Technology Lab Grant and the Nevada Museum of Art Peter E. Pool Research Fellowship. His work has been exhibited at SITE Santa Fe, LACMA, C/O Berlin and MASS MoCA, among others. He has been profiled in The New York Times and National Geographic. (Website, Instagram, Facebook)
