Bio

Ted Lawson is an American artist working across all media. He develops his ideas through multiple concurrent series’ of works that conceptually overlap and interconnect as they progress. The diverse range of materials and underlying technologies he engages are bound together by oft recurring art-historical themes, most frequently deployed as a “God’s eye POV” to describe what is existentially human.

Lawson usually begins each series with a question or an unproven theory – an anxious emotional equation that can only be known when the objects have been manifested and fully materialized. To Lawson, process is the only real truth suspended by the beautiful illusions of meticulous craft. When no medium or method currently exists to extract the concept, he will develop or invent one. The resulting forms are both poetic and abstracted, yet often distinctly hyper-real; decoys that lure the viewer across an uncanny valley with the objective of creating an immediate emotional connection.

In paintings, sculptures and myriad situational tableaux, Lawson’s work uses various color schema as a way of distilling intricate surfaces and forms to an essential state, even while their constituent parts are as disparate as synthetic hair, robotic eyes, stainless steel, cast silicone, MDF or pure pigment. He is known to use digital technology and algorithms and as both a window into our future selves and a regressive analogy of our times. Works from each series are often recast in alternating roles – as actors portraying the overarching parts in a greater thematic story.

Born in 1970 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Ted Lawson currently lives and works in New York City.