Lawrence Lek creates speculative worlds and site-specific simulations using gaming software, video, installation and performance. Often based on real places and fictional artists, his digital environments reflect the impact of the virtual on our perception of reality. Contrasts between utopia and ruins, desire and loss, and fantasy and history appear throughout his work to symbolise this exchange. Lek is a graduate of the Cooper Union, the Architectural Association, and Trinity College, Cambridge. His work has been featured in recent exhibitions at Tramway, as part of Glasgow International 2016; Seoul Museum of Art, as part of Seoul Mediacity Biennial 2016, KW Institut, Berlin, Germany; ICA, London; Cubitt Gallery, London; Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge and the Delfina Foundation, London. Prior to the Jerwood/FVU Awards, he received the Tenderflix/Tenderpixel Artist Video Award and the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award.
Press Release - The Jerwood/FVU Awards 2017 exhibition will premiere two newly commissioned moving-image works by selected artists Patrick Hough and Lawrence Lek, the recipients of the 2017 Awards.
In response to the curatorial theme, Neither One Thing Or Another, Hough and Lek both employ pioneering, conceptually fitting, technologies to examine the steadily blurring line between the real and the artificial. Lek harnesses his trademark - the building blocks of computer gaming technology - to set the stage for an awakening of artificial intelligence. Hough’s work takes us to the Californian desert, where the landscape was filmed and digitally scanned using LiDAR, to host a Hollywood-inspired merging of authenticity and replica. Both works delve between definitions of consciousness, and in the process invite us to ...