The artists Patrick Hough and Lawrence Lek are the recipients of the 2017 Jerwood/FVU Awards. They will each receive £20,000 to develop new film works to be exhibited at Jerwood Space in spring 2017.
The artists were selected from over 240 applications by a panel consisting of Steven Bode, director, Film and Video Umbrella (FVU); Duncan Campbell, artist; Cliff Lauson, curator, Hayward Gallery; Amy Sherlock, reviews editor, Frieze; and Sarah Williams, head of programme, Jerwood Visual Arts.
In response to a curatorial theme of ‘Neither One Thing or Another’, Hough and Lek’s proposals both look at the blurring between the real and the artificial.
Lek – who won the 2015 Dazed Emerging Artist Award and recently presented his biggest commission yet at Glasgow International – will look at the area of artificial intelligence.
Known for working with digital technology to create virtual environments that skirt between reality and fiction, his Jerwood/FVU Awards commission will feature an autonomous computer that ‘ponders the range and limits of its post-human powers of creativity’.
Hough works across film, photography and sculpture and has a particular interest in our relationship with objects. His commission will see him bring to life props and décor from abandoned film sets.
Commenting on the work of the selected artists, Sherlock said: “The proposals… 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.”
Bode added: “This year’s theme clearly struck a definite chord with a large number of applicants. “The title, for all its overtones of uncertainty and ambiguity, managed to be many things to many people, inspiring responses that embraced key contemporary subjects such as gender-fluidity and migration while evoking the blurring boundaries between offline and online, between the physical and the digital.”
Work by the recipients of the 2016 Jerwood/FVU Awards, Alice May Williams and Karen Kramer, opens at CCA, Glasgow on 28 May.
Image:
1. Lawrence Lek, QE3, 2016, commissioned for Glasgow International 2016
2. Patrick Hough, Funerary Relief, CNC Milled Polystyrene, plaster, acrylic, 74 x 43 x 42 cm, 2016
More on a-n.co.uk:
Turner Prize 2016: sculpture dominates this year’s shortlist
A Q&A with… Lawrence Lek, artist and creator of digital environments
a-n Degree Shows Guide 2016
