His found object art and video pieces, which incorporate themes of nostalgia and anxiety, and draw on elements of pop culture, span several works and exhibitions.
[4][6] Leckey moved to New York in late 1995 and first returned to London in 1997, where he worked for web design agency Online Magic.
[8][9] He lives in north London with his wife, Lizzie Carey-Thomas, a curator of contemporary art at the Serpentine Gallery, and their daughter.
"[4] Matthew Higgs has described his work as “possess[ing] a strange nonartlike quality, operating, as it does, on the knife's edge where art and life meet.
[13] In 2013, Leckey toured the UK for his curatorial project, The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, commissioned by the Hayward Gallery.
The title comes from a letter by Guillaume Apollinaire, in which he claims that what he and filmmaker Georges Méliès do is "lend enchantment to vulgar materials".
At one point an animated element - a bird tattoo image - appears as if released from the hand of a dancer, then carried into the next shot finds its place on the arm of another of the film's nightclubbing subjects.
Writing about Leckey’s first few video pieces, which in addition to Fiorucci… include We Are (Untitled) (2000) and Parade (2003), the art critic Catherine Wood said that they "represent the human subject striving to spread itself out into a reduced dimensionality.
His subjects dance, take drugs and dress up in their attempts to transcend the obstinate physicality of the body and disappear in abstract identification with the ecstasy of music, or the seamlessness of the image.
"[19] The title, Leckey said, was about the notion that "something as trite and throwaway and exploitative as a jeans manufacturer can be taken by a group of people and made into something totemic, and powerful, and life-affirming."
The camera rotates around Jeff Koons’ Rabbit (1986), which is placed in the center of the empty room, Leckey's London flat.
"[4] In this video Leckey appropriates the Drunken Bakers comic strip from Viz, written by Barney Farmer and illustrated by Lee Healey.
Leckey has removed all the speech bubbles and replaced them with a dialogue read verbatim from the comic by himself and Steven Claydon, a member of his band JackTooJack.
"[23] Roberta Smith noted "Mr. Leckey conveys an oppressive sense of the drinker's irresistible drive for oblivion, excavating the painful realities that often spur comedy."
The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things was a curated exhibition held at the Bluecoat Gallery, Liverpool, then at Nottingham Contemporary.
It took its title from a supposed concept in computing that refers to "the possibility of a network of objects communicating with each other like sentient agents", and featured three galleries presenting different collections of artifacts and art pieces from a wide range of history.
Harry Thorne, writing for Frieze, commented that elements of the film, such as recurring references to solar and lunar eclipses (which Leckey has attributed to himself astrologically being a Cancerian or a "moonchild"),[25] and countdowns,[25] "communicate a desire to comprehend the greater universe that is specific to both a particular era and to the artist himself".