Luxury Row

With Luxury Row, Ira Villafranca continues a body of work he has been building for the past few years. When asked what drives his work, Ira says he is “fascinated by the relationship between fiction and reality.” He sees fiction “as a vehicle that both reflects and helps us understand reality.” He uses stark, graphic drawings to “move viewers back and forth between fiction and reality” and to create a world in which we will find “elements both alien and familiar.”

Born and raised on O‘ahu, Villafranca completed his BFA at University of Hawai‘i–Mānoa. His current body of work focuses on illustration and sequential storytelling.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website