BIOGRAPHY
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John
LeKay,
born
June 1, 1961 in
London, England is a
sculptor, neo-conceptual, installation artist. He
was privately educated and after studying at London’s Isleworth Polytechnic
University in 1977, he began
his career as a painter and filmmaker. He later turned
to making sculpture in the early 80s and has exhibited
his artwork in galleries and museums throughout the US
and Europe.
Most of his
ideas and inspiration stem from his interests and
studies in eastern
and western spiritual and wisdom traditions, mysticism, psychology, metaphysics, philosophy, poetry and science.
-
- His use
of materials is constantly evolving and yet there is a
continual link in the ideas. Whether it's
sensitively balancing found object assemblage sculptures
or magnetically levitating heads, photography, painting
or film, there is an ethereal and precarious element to
much of his work which often expresses an out of the
ordinary sense of humor, that often seriously turns onto
the spectator, like a Zen slap. Along
with his olfactory pieces, hypnosis chamber and cryonic
suspension dewar; these illustrate the intangible and
imperceptible aspects of the human condition. He
is currently working on two books and is the publisher of
Heyoka magazine.
contact:
info@heyokamagazine.com
SENSORY DEPRIVATION
In
his first one person show
in New York at the Paula Alan Gallery (1990), LeKay exhibited a sensory deprivation tank (containing 3,000 lbs of
water and Epsom salts). The samadhi tank is designed
to isolate the mind and body from all known forms of
external stimulation; tactile, auditory, visual and
olfactory stimulants (sound, light, touch and pressure on
the body are eliminated by the blackened out sound proof
chamber). The effects of gravity and pressure are negated by
floating horizontally in 800 lbs. of Epsom salts and water
solution. The effects of temperature to the body are
eliminated by adjusting the salt solution temperature to the
that of the outside body temperature which is 94.5 degrees.
As a result of total deprivation, one is induced into a
deeply relaxed state. Traditional art stimulates the mind
through external visual and auditory stimuli, i.e. painting,
sculpture and music etc. Conversely, as an art object, the
sensory deprivation tank functioned as an instrument which created an internal mental
movie of one's memories and hypnogogic thoughts. During the
show, a number of artists and dealers used the tank
(including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Frederieke Taylor).
In the same show
there also were perforated stainless steel olfactory
objects and odor absorbers, metagnomic perception boxes (designed
to trigger perception that is obtained from a source outside the
five normal human senses), tactile boxes and
metamorphic crystallizing chemical sculptures. He was inspired to do
these pieces after reading a
book on the brain and memory and associations, etc. I was
thinking of a way to conjure images and thoughts in people's
minds without pictures or having to use one's vision. These
initial pieces
led me to the sensory deprivation tank and tactile objects.
CRYONIC
SUSPENSION
In
1991, at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York he
said. The cryonic
suspension dewar (1990) was kind of like a camera. The dewar is used to freeze something or
someone in time. The difference is that a photographic
image deteriorates through time and so does the paper it's
on. The great thing about cryonic suspension is that in
liquid nitrogen, everything stops; there is no deterioration
and no decay. Time stands still in there. At 196° C, 320°
F below zero, all metabolic and biochemical activity is
brought to a halt. At the opening, the dewar was
accompanied by a documentary video showing the cryogenic procedure.
The members of the cryonics organization
(including scientists with clipboards) were available to answer
questions and sign up interested individuals. My intention
was for an art collector to buy the dewar so that when
he/she died, they would be frozen it it. The collector
would become a part of the piece, "kept in storage" for a
while, and then resurrected in the future; kind of like a
time machine.
HYPNOSIS
CHAMBER
Around that time at
the Bronx Museum, he exhibited an hypnosis
chamber in which the participant's memory of being in the
chamber would be wiped clean by a post hypnotic suggestion, upon
stepping outside of the chamber. Inside was
a reclining chair, headphones and tape machine with written
instructions to turn it on. Once the participant turned on
the tape machine, the tape induced them into a light state
of hypnosis and implanted a post hypnotic suggestion that
once they step outside of the curtain, the entire experience
of listening to his voice, seeing the tape machine and sitting
in the chair inside the curtain would be erased from their
memory - so they re-enter again and again.
SEX-PIECES
In 1990-91
he
exhibited "sex-pieces" at Feature Gallery and with Kenny Schacter Rove Gallery. These pieces consisted of a Ring of Dolls (blow up dolls wearing
Disney masks
copulating with each other in the form of a circle); along
with many other pieces (sexual surrogate devices). One
included a Mickey Mouse blowup doll looking into a bag of
garage.
AMALGAMATIONS
In
his second one person show at the Randy Alexander gallery in
New York (1991), he exhibited five Arte Povera inspired found objects
(with wheelchairs, leg braces,
prosthetic devices, plastinated surrogate
devices, palpating scrotums obtained from a medical
teaching catalog) in a show on death and dying,
inspired from a book by Elizabeth Kubler Ross.
At
the Cohen Gallery (1993), LeKays work
addressed calamitous social conditions in Separation of Church and State
consisting of five large
assemblage sculptures entitled Lazy Boy Jesus,
Whose Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue, Ziperdeedudazipperdeeday
and These Colors Don't Run {(1992)
which is at once an anti-monument to war and a functioning deathtrap}. It features
a wooden plank leading up through barbed wire to a bucket of oil, an American flag, a pail of water in
which an apparently live electrical extension cord is submerged, a
gnarl of brown packing tape and a tape deck blaring Jimi Hendrix'
George Melrod.
PIG MAGAZINE
In 1991 he founded
and published 6 issues of Pig Magazine.
The
name was inspired by
Nostradamous' apocalyptic quatrain about men in flying
machines with pig snouts. PIG stands for
Politically
Incorrect
Geniuses. He said: Pig
was an experiment and exercise
on risk taking. It served as a "third eye" monitor and
critique of the press and other magazines. and news papers. It was an open
forum; somewhat like "Speaker's Corner" in Hyde Park. There
was a section where artists could respond to reviews and
where critics could review other critic's reviews; also
drawings, photographs, poetry, essays and cartoons. I wanted
to point out paradoxes by satirizing and decoding subliminal
messages in advertising, fashion, the film industry and the
art world.
Other people that worked on
and edited the magazine
included
Erik Oppenheim, Gavin Brown, Gretchen Faust and Damien Hirst.
Other contributors included
Robert
Mahoney, Anna de Portella, Rachel Harrison, Kristin
Oppenhiem, Cary Liebowitz, Chuck Nanny, John Trembly, Stefan
Stux, Pruit and Early, Peter Seidler, Dennis Oppenheim,
Jutta Koelter, Kevin Landers,
Richard Phillips, Charles Graff, Sean Landers, Rikrit
Tiravaneja, Fred Tomaselli, Lois Nesbit, Jerry
Saltz, Howard Haley, Benjamin Weil, Conceptual Clearing
House Ltd., Elke Kruystofek, Kim Jones, Lama
Anagonka Govinda, George Brecht, Marcia Tucker,
Adrienne Rich, Chwang Tzu, z, Kabir, Francesco Bonami,
Marilyn Minter, Daniel Moynihan, Nancy Smith, John Tower,
Suzanne Trimble, Marcus Harvey, Angus Fairhurst. Lisa
Spellman, Kenny Schachter, Tanya Bonakdar, Colin Deland ,
Pat Hearn and Georg Kargl from Austria were also involved as
art dealers selling it.
PARA PIECES
LeKay
subsequently exhibited The
Delirium of the Neutral Angel (1994) with Kenny Schachter in New York (25 transforming gargoyle crystal sculptures made out
of paradichlorobenzene surrounding the Neutral Angel).
The first of these paradichlorobenzene pieces was
inspired by an ancient Mayan crystal scull. This is a para-scull
with a nose added to it.
Right now the
shapes of the heads are kind of grotesque, scull-like and
demonic; but the dazzling material makes them look like
enormous diamonds, sapphires, rubies and emeralds. I
discovered paradichlorobenzine through my
interests in ancient alchemy.
Auroleus Phillipus Theostratus Bombastus von Hohenheim,
known as Paracelcus also described this chemical that sounds
very similar. Kekule once had a dream about the benzene
ring. A snake devouring it's own tail, the Ouroborus is
a symbol of the eternal unity of all things, the cycle of
birth and death from which the alchemists sought release and liberation
The six sided ring, of this carbon compound is also found in
the patterns of snowflakes. 6 is the number of perfection
in ancient numerology and the secret to creativity. This idea
inspired another piece I made, but of a man devouring his own tail.
I
have always been fascinated by this material. I think I even tried to
eat it once as a kid. It's not just the odor I find interesting, but
the look of it and more importantly the alchemistry of it.
I exhibited this same
installation at the University at Buffalo Art Gallery (1995)
where I was also asked to give a lecture. A couple of the
paradichlorobenzene pieces were also shown a the New Museum
of Contemporary Art.
I
made another Blue Neutral Angel (with WW1 gas mask) which
represented nuclear war, acid rain, uranium bombs and the
depletion of the ozone.
POUR PAINTINGS
From 1990 - 1994
LeKay made pour paintings out of metallic lacquer car
paint. I
had been reading The Watercourse Way by Alan Watts at
the time and wanted to use the least amount of effort as
possible, the Taoist concept of Wu -Wei. I did some experiments on the smaller
ones with an electric hair dryer. The larger ones with an
electric fan. I also set them up on a kind of see-saw swivel
table made out of plywood and swiveled and tilted them to
get the various shapes, Each one was done extremely slowly
and very carefully, because it was very easy for the paint
to run over the edges, which I did not want. These
were exhibited at Randy Alexander and at the Cohen Gallery.
PARA- MODERNISM
In 2003 he began
to work on more of the paradichlorobenzine pieces.
Drinking Clouds (Para Buddha) consists of a chemical crystal
Buddha head which is evaporating as the fans suck and blow
the gas through the tubes and into the empty vitrine. The
gas will eventually solidify and attach itself to the
armature in the empty vitrine. Like slow alchemical
teleportation.
MAGNETIC LEVITATION
in
2002 he began working on a series of magnetic levitating
sculptures. Some implanted with Swarovski crystals.
HEYOKA MAGAZINE
In
January 2005,
he founded an environmental and humanitarian art magazine encompassing philosophy, psychology,
music, fashion, painting, sculpture, film and journalism
entitled Heyoka Magazine. Heyoka is Lakota Sioux for contrarian
or sacred clown. The traditional heyoka
are quite fascinating
the way they brought about balance, self
awareness, a kind of reality check and order by
doing this in similar ways. Makes me think of
Lenny Bruce and his humour which was deadly
serious and lethal like a Zen slap or a bucket
of ice cold water over your head. Humour
is very powerful medicine and can hit you like
a thunderbolt, but like other
medicine, needs to be measured and in the right
dose.
Film
2008. "Arts
du mythe" Rock Crystal Skull. Directed by
Philippe
Truffault
2007.
Near life Experiences. Directed by Stephanie
Schwam
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Solo Exhibitions
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1995 University at Buffalo Art
Gallery, Buffalo, NY
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1994 Kenny Schachter, New York
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1993 Cohen Gallery, New York
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1991 Randy Alexander Gallery,
New York
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1990 Paula Allen Gallery, New
York
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Group Exhibitions
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2008. "Men on Maps" Haven Arts gallery, New
York.
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2005 Heyoka
Magazine Volume 1.
www.heyokamagazine.com
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2001 "Full Serve"curated by
Kenny Schachter.
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2000 Modern Museum of Art,
Lisbon, Portugal
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2000 Sex, Drugs and
Explosives, London, England.
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1998
"Combio" curated by Kenny
Schachter, Sandra Gering Gallery, NY
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1996 "The Experimenters" curated by Kenny Schachter, Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, NY
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"Trading Stock", curated by Kenny Schachter, N.Y.
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"Texas Meets New York: Facing the Millennium - the song
remains the same",
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Arlington Museum of Art, curated by
Kenny Schachter, Texas
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"Sex & Drugs & Explosives" London Artforms, curated by
Kenny Schachter, London
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1995
"OY", curated by Kenny
Schachter, New York
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"Hard Comforts", curated by Klaus Ottman,
Wesleyan University, Conn.
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"The Monster Show", curated by Bonnie Clearwater,
COCA, Miami Fla.
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"The Enthusiast" curated by Gavin Brown,
Gavin Brown's Enterprise, NY
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"Looky Loo", curated
by Kenny Schachter, Sculpture Center, NY
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"Human Nature", The New
Museum of Contemporary Art, NY
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"High Anxiety", curated by Kenny Schachter, New York
1994 "Please, Don't Hurt Me", curated by Jack Jaeger, Cabinet
Gallery, London
"unsuccess story" curated by Kenny
Schachter, New York
"Drawing on
Sculpture" curated by Tanya Bonakdar,
Cohen Gallery, NY
"American Artists - Heads Only", Florida International
University Museum
(Miami) curated by Dahlia Morgan
"Dirty", John Good
Gallery, curated by John Good and
Carol Greene, NY
"I Can Do That", curated by Kenny Schachter, New York
"Pig Magazine", Franklin Furnace
- Artists' Book Archives / MOMA Archives
1993 "Shooting Blanks", curated by Kenny Schachter, New York
"Displace", curated
by Tanya Bonakdar, Cohen Gallery, NY
"For Sale", Flamingo
East, curated by Kenny Schachter, New York
1992 "Paintings", Cohen Gallery, New York
(Project Room)
"Fever", Exit Art, curated by Papo Colo & Jeanette Ingerman,
"Thirty-Something", curated by Eric Oppenheim, Metropol
Gallery, Austria
"Trouble Over So Much
Skin", curated by Hudson, Feature
Gallery, NY
"Morality Cafe", Postmasters Gallery, NY, curated
by Kenny Schachter
"Writings on the
Wall", curated by Lisa Spellman, 303 Gallery, NY
"Stussy", curated by
Hudson, Feature Gallery, N
"Unlearning", 142
Green Street, NY, Curated by
Kenny Schachter
Group Show, Jack Tilton Gallery, NY, curated by
Gavin Brown and Eric Oppenheim
"One Leading to Another", curated by Peter Nadin, 303
Gallery, NY
"12 Videos / 12 Artists", Dooley le Capellaine, NY,
Curated by Eric Oppenheim
Founded and Published "Pig Magazine", inaugurated at
"Water Bar", 303 Gallery,
NY (Edited by John LeKay)
Published 2nd issue of "Pig Magazine", exhibited at
"Water Bar",
Jack Tilton Gallery,
NY (Edited by John LeKay)
Published and exhibited 3rd Issue of "Pig Magazine" at
"Water Bar", Blum
Hellman Warehouse, NY (Edited by Gavin
Brown)
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Published and exhibited 4th Issue of "Pig Magazine" at
Pat Hearn Gallery, NY
(Edited by Gretchen Faust)
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Published and exhibited 5th Issue of "Das Schwein" at
Gallery Metropol,
Vienna Austria (Edited by John LeKay);
also exhibited at Ausstellungsraum Kunstlerhaus
Stuttgart
Published and exhibited 6th Issue of "Pig Magazine" at
"Shooting Blanks", NY
(Edited by John LeKay)
"Open Bar", New
York, Curated by Kenny Schachter
1991 "The Interruption of Life - Death and Dying" The New
Museum of Contemporary Art, NY, Curated by France Morin
"Decorous Beliefs",
New York, Curated by Kenny Schachter
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1990 "New Works on Paper", curated by Randy Alexander - Paula Allen Gallery, NY
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"A Decade in the Marketplace", Bronx
Museum of Art, Bronx, NY, Curated by
-
Laura Hoptman
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"The New Eccentricity: Sculpture", Bess Cutler Gallery,
NY, Curated by
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Frederieke Taylor
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"Societal Images", White Columns Gallery, NY, Curated by
Bill Arning
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1988 "Gravity and Blindness", curated by Vik Muniz and John
LeKay PS 122, NY
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1987 "Artists in the Marketplace", Bronx Museum of Art,
Bronx, NY
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8th Annual South Bronx Show", Satellite Gallery, Bronx,
NY
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1987 "Unauthorized Authority
series". Museum of Modern art, New York,
Curated by John LeKay and Vik Muniz ( Art
labels superimposed on labels of art work by Robert
Smithson, Eva Hess, Keith Sonnier, Robert Ryman and
Ellsworth Kelly. Also installation of a ready
made sculpture of a fire hydrant on the wall with accompanying
label.
Selected
Bibliography
Hoyle, Ben
"
Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull goes
to unknown investors for £50m"
The Australian.
September 2007
Cohen,David.
"Inside
Damien Hirst's factory"
Evening Standard. London. 08 -30-07
Sophie
Heawood
"In
a world where everything is possible, highwayman
Hirst is the" The
Independent
on Sunday,
London,
Jul 1, 2007
Dalya Aldridge. "My old friend Stole my scull
idea". The Times. London. June 2007
Jim Drobnick . "Reveries, Assaults and
Evaporating Presences: Olfactory Dimensions in
Contemporary Art" Parachute magazine. 1998
Holland Cotter. "The
Experimenters". New York Times. 1997
Robert Mahoney "Art, Review "
Time Out New York. January 16-1997
Ellen Paul.
Do it yourself dealers. The New
York Times Magazine. September 1, 1996, Sunday
Charles Dee Mitchell "Eastern Seeboard " Dallas Morning Star.
November 28-1996
Elisa Turner
Monsters in our midst. The Miami
Herald. Oct 15 1995
Michael Goldberg. "Angels and Demons decay in
LeKay sculptures" September 1995
Mitchell, Charles Dee
"Accommodating
Monsters" "Buffalo University Exhibition
catalogue" 1995
John Lee Debrah Stutz Hard comforts. Wesleyan university catalogue. May 1995
Richard Huntington "Leap of Faith" Buffalo
News. August 11 -1995
David
Lillington. Please Don't Hurt Me" Cabinet
Gallery London. August 1995
Mathew
Ritchie John LeKay Kenny Schachter. Flash Art.
April 95
Helen Cohen
"heads only, more than a just a pretty face "
The Miami Herald. April 17th 1994
Roberta Smith
"For the New Galleries of the 90's, Small (and Cheap) Is
Beautiful" New York Times April 22, 1994
Roberta Smith
"Review/Art New York Times April 22,1994
Kim Levin "Art, Choice "
The Village Voice. November 22-1994
George Melrod
"John LeKay at Cohen. Reviews"
Art in America.
Nov- 1993
Adrian Dannatt John LeKay . Cohen. Flash Art.
December 1993
Roberta Smith. "Examining Cultures Through its
Castoffs" New York times. November 28th 1993
Perchuk,
Andrew "John Lekay. Cohen Gallery. Reviews"
Art Forum International. 1993
Damien Hirst, John LeKay "Separation of Church and State"
Cohen Gallery catalogue" April 1993
Gretchen Faust "Separation of Church and State"
Cohen Gallery catalogue" April 1993
Kim Levin.
"Trouble Over So much Skin". Voice choices. The
Village Voice.
"Trouble Over
So much Skin". The New Yorker. July 27th 1992
"Will the
real Eric Oppenheim Please Stand up'. The New
Yorker July 20th 1992
Kim Levin.
"Morality Cafe" Voice Choice. June 1992
Kim Levin.
'Voice Choice" Village Voice. April 27th
1993
Michel
Kimmelman. Promising Start at a New Location"
New York Times . December 18th 1992
Robert Mahoney "Unlearning"
Arts Magazine. Febuary-1992
Trouble over so much skin"
The New
Yorker. July-1992
Gretchen Faust
"John LeKay at Randy Alexander". Jan 1992
William Zimmer .
"50 artists reunited at the Bronx museum" New York Times.
June 1990
Roberta Smith
John LeKay. Paula Allen. New York Times. June 8th 1990
