Lawrence Lemaoana lived in the small mining town of Welkom before returning to Johannesburg to continue his studies. He went on to study for a Bachelors of Fine Art at the University of Johannesburg where he received his B-Tech Degree majoring in Fine Arts. Lemaoana is currently completing his Master’s at the Wits School of Art. Lemaoana is a junior lecturer in Visual Art at UNISA’s Art History, Visual arts & Musicology Department. Lemaoana’s body of work has, as its departure point, a fascination with the role of the mass media in present-day South Africa. In Lemaoana’s work, the relationship between the ‘People’ and the media is problematized as a relationship of representation and control – who gets to control modes of representation; and who gets to represent those in control. The power of the media to act as didactic tool or propagandistic weapon, and the power of the media to reveal and shape the psyche, or group consciousness of the People, is taken up in Lemaoana’s work with the artist’s trademark cynical satire.
