Visual artist Olalekan Jeyifous, known as LEk, blends his foundational artist Olalekan Jeyifous, known as LEk, blends his foundational training in architecture with a profound impulse for daydreams, creating immersive speculative worlds that serve to reconcile his architectural background with his large-scale public art installations. LEk, who describes himself as having always been a daydreamer and still living in that "very intense world in my mind," maintains his connection to the "sights, the smells, the frenetic energy" of Nigeria, where he was born and from which his family departed partly due to a military coup. His aesthetic identity was broadly shaped by childhood trips to the public library with his mother, where they would explore coffee table art books covering subjects from Impressionism to Danish furniture design and Senegalese sculpture or architecture, allowing him to define himself as an artist "not defined by one specific category".
LEk’s artistic vision gained significant recognition through his work featured by The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). His notable project, "The Frozen Neighborhoods Project," was exhibited at MoMA in 2021 as part of a Reconstructions exhibit. This project was born from an ideation walk near his Crown Heights apartment, where he has lived for 25 years. Focusing on the specific corner of Klossen and Dean, LEk took a photo and "imagined the street," turning the thoroughfares into "completely flooded. Wetland marshes". He created scenes showing people swimming or getting baptized, where these "dystopian parameters create almost a kind of utopian world". The project focused on making the community fully self-sustaining through the idea of "rewilding," where nature overtakes dilapidated architecture to create a viable space for communities to live within.
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Reimagining cities through a dreamer’s eyes
His practice relies heavily on daily observations, gathered during evening walks in his neighborhood where he stops constantly, sometimes every "15, 20 yards," to capture details. He documents the green of vegetation mixed with turquoise, the library of graffiti and "ghost signs as well from earlier industry," and even the different types of "surveillance" present. These details are incorporated into his digital scenes, which he creates using SketchUp and Escape for 3D modeling before moving to Photoshop to "really load up the layers with more and more detail". His work around Crown Heights, including his original lo-fi analog collages, is dedicated to "preserving the people that have been living here" while creating a "new condition and space for them to occupy".
Despite his architectural background, LEk believes architecture is often designed "expressly to marginalize" rather than with community input, defining it by the way people gather and engage with space. He confronts people's expectations that "architecture solves problems," noting that people often want solutions more than they want criticisms or questions. For LEk, who understands that architecture "doesn't disentangle from the broader system that we're in," his primary motivation remains personal: he is "a hundred percent making it for me" and his daydreams. He hopes to encourage people to realize they possess the power to shape the way cities look, arguing that elements like the shape of a stop sign or street width codes are simply "decisions made by individuals". Ultimately, the experience of entering his speculative worlds, whether through the MoMA exhibit or via a virtual reality trip to the "Mars experience," provides a unique path to "begin dreaming".
