Luke Fowler: Patrick

November 6 – 14, 2026 | FREE
Lobby Projection Array
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings St., Vancouver

Luke Fowler’s work has long asked how we come to know someone in their absence. He has explored this question by creating posthumous portraits of individuals through precise compositions of the things they have left behind: recorded images and sounds, papers and notes, artwork, the spaces through which they moved, and the testimonies of friends who remain among the living. Patrick (2020) evokes the life of its eponymous music producer [Patrick Cowley] by all these means, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.

– Ed Halter

Biography

Luke Fowler lives and works in Glasgow. Fowler questions the style and political implications of conventional modes of documentary through a varied practice which encompasses film, sound, installation and photography. He is concerned with finding new ways to meaningfully engage with marginal cultural figures as well as spaces and archive materials through the medium of 16mm film. His moving image works have charted an alternative history of Britain as well as considering significant international musicians and artists – revisiting the work of Margaret Tait, R. D. Laing, Patrick Cowley, and Brunhild Ferrari, amongst others. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012 and received the inaugural Derek Jarman Award in 2008. In 2014, MACK published Fowler’s first monograph of his Photo Archive. Fowler’s Mum’s Cards was awarded the 2019 Scottish Short Film Award at Glasgow Short Film Festival and the prize for Best Short at Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival of Navarre, Spain. And his Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait was awarded the La Scam International Award 2023 at Cinéma du Réel.