Michael Lent is a BritishâÂÂAmerican visual artist, academic, curator and researcher. He studied at Tyler School of Art of Temple University where he received a BFA, and earned his MFA at Goddard College supervised by sound artist Andrea Parkins, and his PhD at the University of Lincoln.
Michael Lent utilises drawing, installation, text, and video in his visual art, which often focuses on a documentation of ephemeral spaces, landscape, and conceptual spaces in studio. His work has been described as: "a daring blend of text, sound and image", in the journal TriQuarterly, which summarized his approach with:
This notion of the difficulty of representing experience is recurring in Lent's work, and is also prevalent in much of his research as an interest in alterity and an investigation of an experience of the world alongside perceptions of the world as Other.
Lent has exhibited internationally, including at Bluecoat in Liverpool, MASS MoCA in Massachusetts, and AlbrightâÂÂKnox Art Gallery in New York City. He has also been the recipient of various awards, including funding from the New York Foundation for the Arts.
Michael LentâÂÂs research focuses on location and the intersection between space and place. He asserts that the way we approach and experience the world, in fact leads âÂÂto a spatial disappearance into place.â In both his research and visual practice, Lent attempts to court this dissolution as an attempt to âÂÂuncover and produce an imagining of spaceâ as an investigation into the experience of site without âÂÂhastening its dissolution.â Through this he examines alterity as a method for avoiding this dissolution whilst preserving the unknown in space âÂÂas an act towards singularity.âÂÂ
Michael LentâÂÂs research has been presented at the Royal Geographical Society, Americans for the Arts, University of Minho, in Portugal, and Bahçeà Âehir University, in Istanbul. His work is to be published by Routledge in an upcoming volume alongside other writers such as Victor Burgin and Stephen Bann. In LentâÂÂs book Courting Dissolution, he examines what role art has in colonization and subsequent dissolution. In the London School of Economics Book Review it was characterised as taking âÂÂup the problem of space and spatiality as it emerges in the context of a world defined by globalisation and capitalist over-production,â and observed it âÂÂbrings together an astute and astonishing array of theoretical sources to make sense of a world increasingly defined by globalisation and capitalist over-production.âÂÂ
Lent was the creator and publisher of Toby Room, a journal that featured interviews and original work by contemporary artists and writers. In 2002, he and fellow artist Jared Pappas-Kelley created the arts organization ArtRod, which encompassed both the public media Tollbooth Gallery project as well as Critical Line art centre, which has since been reimagined as an online project.