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 look again at what we think we know and see.
The artists have each received £20,000 to develop the works, with full production support from FVU. Following their debut at Jerwood Space in London, the films will tour as a series of screening events nationwide.
The artists were selected from over 240 applications by; Steven Bode, Director, FVU; Duncan Campbell, artist and Turner Prize 2014 winner; Cliff Lauson, Curator, Hayward Gallery; Amy Sherlock, Reviews Editor; and Sarah Williams, Head of Programme, Jerwood Visual Arts.
On the two works, panelist and Reviews Editor for Frieze, Amy Sherlock commented:
“Both selected artists, Patrick Hough and Lawrence Lek, use a temporal framework to approach the question of indeterminacy: one looking forward to a future where machines may write their own histories; the other considering the imaginative leap involved in looking backwards, and the ways in which, narratively and materially, we fabricate the past. I am excited not only to see the results of these two ambitious projects, but also how they will sit alongside one another in the Jerwood/FVU Awards exhibition.”
On development and production of the works, FVU Director Steven Bode commented:
“It is always wonderful watching an artist’s work transform from an idea on paper into tangible, polished reality. Even more so in the case of Lawrence Lek and Patrick Hough, whose approaches to this year’s Awards have been so formally exciting and conceptually audacious. Not to mention technically original, with their mobilisation of leading-edge digital imaging and voice synthesis. It has been a pleasure helping these exceptional works reach fruition.”
