Bio
Ted Lawson is an American artist working across all media. He produces his works through multiple iterative series’ that conceptually overlap and intersect as they develop. The diverse range of materials and underlying technologies he engages are bound together by oft recurring art-historical themes and mythology, deployed in the “God’s eye POV.” He is describing what is existentially flawed and human.
Lawson usually begins each series with a question or an unproven theory – an anxious emotional equation that can only be known after the objects have been fully materialized. To Lawson, process is the only truth suspended by the carefully articulated lies of meticulous craft. When no medium or method is available he may invent one. The resulting forms are poetic and abstracted, yet distinctly hyper-real; decoys to lure the viewer across an uncanny valley to create an emotional connection.
In paintings, sculptures and myriad situational tableaux, Lawson’s work often uses monochromatic color schema as a way of distilling intricate surfaces and forms to an essential state, while their constituent parts are as disparate as synthetic hair, robotic eyes, stainless steel, cast silicone, MDF and pure pigment. He is known to use digital technology and algorithms as both a window into our future selves and as a regression. Works from each series are often cast in alternating roles portraying the overarching parts of a larger narrative story.
Born in 1970 in Brookline, Massachusetts, Ted Lawson currently lives and works in New York City.