William Lamson

Last updated

William Lamson
Born1977 (age 44–45)
Arlington, Virginia
Nationality American
Known for Installation art, performance Art
Movement Generative art

William Lamson (born 1977) is an American installation artist, performance artist, and generative artist. He was born in Arlington, Virginia, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. [1] Within his artistic career, he works both in the natural world and in his studio. His playful interaction with his environment includes small performances and actions that are captured on video. His diverse artistic practice involves working with elemental forces to create durational performative actions. [2]

Contents

Education

Lamson received his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College and graduated with his B.A. in 2000. [3] Soon after, he went on to pursue his M.F.A. at Bard College, graduating in 2006. [3]

Career achievements

Over his career, Lamson's work has appeared in Artforum , frieze , The New York Times , the Los Angeles Times , The New Yorker , Harper's , and The Village Voice . [2] Lamson was named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and received grants from the Shifting Foundation and the Experimental Television Center. [2]

Artistic process and technique

As an interdisciplinary artist, Lamson uses a wide range of mediums, including video, photography, performance, and sculpture. [3] In many of his projects, he creates an apparatus or props for the actions within the projects, as well as a set of tools for filming the action too. Despite significant logistical challenges, Lamson says the benefit of working this way is that he knows how everything works once they're ready to shoot the video. He builds the props and tools, and operates the camera himself, and budgets multiple days for careful shooting with only one or two assistants. [2] Lamson's thoughtfulness when it comes to the viewer's experience and the function of the camera makes an impact in his work that shows through.

Set in landscapes as varied as New York's East River and Chile's Atacama Desert, his projects reveal the invisible systems and forces at play within these sites. In all his projects, Lamson's work represents a collaboration with forces outside of his control to explore systems of knowledge and belief. [4]

In an interview with Dina Deitsch, a curator, Lamson said that his work is perhaps "a move from performing in front of the camera to performing inside of the image-making system itself." [2]

Exhibitions

Lamson's work has been exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. He's been exhibited in the Brooklyn Museum, The Moscow Biennial, P.S.1 MOMA, Kunsthalle Erfurt, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, and Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles. In addition, he has produced site-specific installations for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Center For Land Use Interpretation, and Storm King Art Center. His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and a number of private collections.

Work

Automatic (2009)

Lamson's work, Automatic (2009), is composed of 3 parts, each harnessing either the forces of wind or the sea. He does so by constructing kinetic contraptions that enlist those natural forces to generate pencil or black-pen drawings. Along with the resulting drawings, a video documents the movement of each apparatus responding to their landscape. Together, Sea Drawings, Kite Drawings, and the resulting 7:41 minute video makes up the project Automatic.

Lamson records each drawing's creation date, location, and duration of the work's making, in addition to the volume of water in the bottles, as though Lamson were conducting a physics experiment, where exact data is crucial. [4] The precision in his process and documentation suggesting the precariousness of these contraptions, the meticulousness needed to produce a satisfactory outcome. [4]

Molino Drawing captured the power of the wind by harnessing the movement of a wind turbine. A string connects a graphite pencil to a moving component of the turbine. [4]

Kite Drawing also harnessed the power of the wind through the use of a kite. For this drawing, a marker is attached to a water bottle, which acts a weight for the marker. The kite's string is threaded through a rough wooden tripod, which acts as an anchor for the setup, so that when the wind blew the kite, the marker is moved across sheets of paper taped to a board underneath the setup. The results yielded an expressive pencil or black-pen drawings. Lamson channels nature's indeterminacy, offering the absurd yet fantastical suggestion that the wind is able to draw. [4]

Sea Drawings were created in Coliumo, Chile on a cliff side overlooking the Pacific Ocean. [4] Lamson created these drawings by harnessing the power of the sea below, capturing the energy in the rise and fall of waves. To do so there is a water bottle hanging down the side of the cliff being lifted up and down by the swells in waves, this, in turn, interacts with a pulley system of sorts connected to a graphite pencil. Close-ups of the apparatus in action show that the pencil's movements appear oddly purposeful, as if a consciousness were driving the mark-making; but in shots from afar, the mechanical process is clear. [4]

A Line Describing the Sun (2010)

A Line Describing the Sun, 2010 A Line Describing the Sun, William Lamson.jpg
A Line Describing the Sun, 2010

His work A Line Describing the Sun (2010) is a two-channel video that documents Lamson melting the desert floor with a Fresnel lens into a line of black glass. [2] He follows the path of the sun moves through the sky, hence the chosen title. With the help of a single assistant, the filming process involved performing this event over five days, capturing everything from wide high-angle shots to macro shots of the melting earth. [2]

Solarium (2012)

In the site-specific installation structure Solarium (2012), was located at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York. [5] The installation structure with three species of citrus trees grown inside. The 82 sq ft experimental structure is a functional greenhouse constructed of a steel frame and panels of caramelized sugar. [5] To create the panels in an "amazing spectrum" of hues, Lamson concocted recipes he made himself, simply boiling refined white sugar until it turned specific shades. [5] The resulting shades vary from clear to opaque black, with saffron, flame orange, primrose, and deep burgundy in between. [5]

Lamson believes that when you approach Solarium up Storm King's grassy hill, you experience the Andrew Wyeth sensibility of "the sanctuary in the landscape." [5] From the outside the structure gives the impression of a chapel of stained glass, and once they are inside, the viewer is able to understand the color of the panels better. These panels also create a colorized frame through which to view the landscape. There is a shifting experience between the unique color and texture of panels themselves as they age and change in the sun. [2]

The structure is centered on a miniature lemon and orange trees symbolizing his interest in sugar as a fundamental requirement for life. [5] All plants create sugars through photosynthesis. Lamson was interested in how the red-yellow light coming through the caramelized panels would affect the plants themselves and wanted to see if they would one day bear fruit. [2] This possibility suggested a recursive materiality at play between the color of the light and the color of the fruit that the trees might produce. [2]

Untitled (Walden) (2015)

The group exhibition Walden, revisited (2015) was a curation of fifteen projects by Dina Deitsch at the deCordova Sculpture Museum and Sculpture Park, a contemporary art museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts. [2] Lamson's piece, Untitled (Walden) is both an installation piece as well as a video. The project is a poetic re-envisioning of the iconic cabin and watery landscape of Henry Thoreau's book Walden. [2]

The Walden Pond is largely influenced by Henry Thoreau's naturalist and philosophical writings. Walden, published in 1854, is a book that details his deliberate escape into the woods to live a life simplified to "only the essential facts" in the now-iconic, self-built, one-room cabin on the shores of the pond. [2] The book infused nature writing with the philosophical underpinnings of Transcendentalism, exalting self-reliance and direct experience of nature as the very marrow of existence. [2] The Walden, revisited exhibition sets out to examine the complicated and evolving legacy of the book against Walden Pond's current landscape, today a state park and popular swimming hole. [2]

To create the video, Lamson built a small-scale model of Thoreau's cabin re-imagined as an artist studio and entirely in white. [2] The model floated on the lake inside of an eight-by-eight-foot cabin-shaped tent that functioned as a camera obscura. [2] The resulting video captures the projected image of the inverted lake landscape as it moves slowly over the interior of the model cabin, illuminating the walls, furniture, and tools within this constructed space. [2]

Lamson's sensitivity to the environmental conditions is critical to how his performative action unfolds and how his video work eventually comes together. The landscape operates as both the subject matter and a set of changing physical parameters that affect how he, the artist, responds to it. [2]

The installation experience is a darkened space where the video is projected across the back wall of the gallery. [2] The video is clips of the camera obscura phenomena in motion. Instead of the viewers seeing the floating cabin on Walden's pond from the shoreline, the camera obscura documentation creates a compression of time, space, and multiple perspectives of the landscape all within the eighteen-minute duration of the piece. [2]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Maya Lin</span> American designer and artist (born 1959)

Maya Ying Lin is an American designer and sculptor. In 1981, while an undergraduate at Yale University, she achieved national recognition when she won a national design competition for the planned Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Raymond Pettibon is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. Pettibon came to prominence in the early 1980s in the southern California punk rock scene, creating posters and album art mainly for groups on SST Records, owned and operated by his older brother, Greg Ginn. He has subsequently become widely recognized in the fine art world for using American iconography variously pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, and religion to politics, sport, and sexuality.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vito Acconci</span> American designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist

Vito Acconci was an influential American performance, video and installation artist, whose diverse practice eventually included sculpture, architectural design, and landscape design. His foundational performance and video art was characterized by "existential unease," exhibitionism, discomfort, transgression and provocation, as well as wit and audacity, and often involved crossing boundaries such as public–private, consensual–nonconsensual, and real world–art world. His work is considered to have influenced artists including Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, Bruce Nauman, and Tracey Emin, among others. Acconci was initially interested in radical poetry, but by the late 1960s, he began creating Situationist-influenced performances in the street or for small audiences that explored the body and public space. Two of his most famous pieces were Following Piece (1969), in which he selected random passersby on New York City streets and followed them for as long as he was able, and Seedbed (1972), in which he claimed that he masturbated while under a temporary floor at the Sonnabend Gallery, as visitors walked above and heard him speaking.

<i>Walden</i> Book by Henry David Thoreau

Walden is a book by American transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau. The text is a reflection upon the author's simple living in natural surroundings. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and—to some degree—a manual for self-reliance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Walden Pond</span> Pond in Concord, Massachusetts

Walden Pond is a pond in Concord, Massachusetts, in the United States. A famous example of a kettle hole, it was formed by retreating glaciers 10,000–12,000 years ago. The pond is protected as part of Walden Pond State Reservation, a 335-acre (136 ha) state park and recreation site managed by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation. The reservation was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962 for its association with the writer Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), whose two years living in a cabin on its shore provided the foundation for his famous 1854 work, Walden; or, Life in the Woods. The National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 ensured federal support for the preservation of the pond.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Xu Bing</span> Chinese artist (born 1955)

Xu Bing is a Chinese artist who served as vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is known for his printmaking skills and installation art, as well as his creative artistic use of language, words, and text and how they have affected our understanding of the world. He is an A.D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellows Program in 1999 and the Fukuoka Prize in 2003.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">James Benning (film director)</span> American filmmaker

James Benning is an American independent filmmaker and educator. Over the course of his 40-year career Benning has made over twenty-five feature-length films that have shown in many different venues across the world. Since 1987, he has taught at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). He is known as a minimalist filmmaker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joan Jonas</span> American visual artist

Joan Jonas is an American visual artist and a pioneer of video and performance art, and one of the most important artists to emerge in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Jonas' projects and experiments were influential in the creation of video performance art as a medium. Her influences also extended to conceptual art, theatre, performance art and other visual media. She lives and works in New York and Nova Scotia, Canada.

Jack Pierson is a photographer and an artist. Pierson is known for his photographs, collages, word sculptures, installations, drawings and artists books. His "Self-Portrait" series was shown in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. His works are held in numerous museum collections.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clifford Ross</span> American artist (born 1952)

Clifford Ross is an American artist who has worked in multiple forms of media, including sculpture, painting, photography and video. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Margaret Cogswell</span> American installation artist and sculptor

Margaret Cogswell is a mixed-media installation artist and sculptor based in New York. She emerged in late 1980s as a sculptor, gaining attention for abstract constructions exploring tensions between natural and human-made materials, roughness and sophistication. Since 2003, Cogswell's work has focused on a series of site-specific installations called "River Fugues": individually unique, multimedia projects involving detailed geographical, historical and social research that explore the intertwining of rivers, industry, people's lives, and the increasingly politicized role of water. The series' title invokes the contrapuntal musical form of the fugue to indicate the weaving of disparate voices, layers and media into a harmonious, composite whole. Critic Lilly Wei described the "River Fugues" as a hybrid form based on musical composition that "expresses the complex beauty of rivers … and sounds an alarm over the sweeping environmental changes that have endangered our natural resources."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Welsby</span>

Chris Welsby is a British/Canadian experimental filmmaker, digital media and installation artist. In the 1970s he was a member of the London Film-Makers' Co-op, and co-founder of the Digital Media Studio at the Slade School of Fine Arts, UCL, London. He is considered one of the pioneers of expanded cinema and moving image installation and was one of the first artists to exhibit film installations at the Tate and Hayward galleries London. His expanded cinema works and installations have since continued to break new conceptual ground and attract critical attention. A. L. Reece, in British Film Institute's A History of Experimental Film and Video, wrote: "Twenty-five years ago, when he made his first projections for large spaces, film and art rarely met in the gallery; now it is common and installation art is a distinct practice."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Heine</span>

Ben Heine is a Belgian multidisciplinary visual artist and music producer. In 2010 media described his "Pencil Vs Camera" art. He is an accomplished illustrator and photographer, He is also the creator of other original art series such as "Digital Circlism" and "Flesh and Acrylic".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Visual arts</span> Art forms that create works that are primarily visual in nature

The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts also involve aspects of visual arts as well as arts of other types. Also included within the visual arts are the applied arts such as industrial design, graphic design, fashion design, interior design and decorative art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Meigh-Andrews</span>

Chris Meigh-Andrews is a video artist, writer and curator from Essex, England, whose work often includes elements of renewable energy technology in tandem with moving image and sound. He is currently Professor Emeritus in Electronic & Digital Art at the University of Central Lancashire and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Moving image Research (CMIR) at the University of the West of England.

Nina Sobell is a contemporary sculptor, videographer, and performance artist. She began creating web-based artworks in the early 1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mel Pekarsky</span> American artist and art educator (born 1934)

Mel Pekarsky is an American artist and art educator. He is best known for his paintings and drawings of the desert, and is recognized by art critic Donald Kuspit as "one of the most significant contemporary landscape artists." A professor of art at the State University of New York at Stony Brook for forty years, Pekarsky's work has been shown by the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard University, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Butler Institute of American Art, among many other venues.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nan Hoover</span>

Nan Hoover was a Dutch/American-expatriate artist who is known for her pioneering work in video art, photography and performance art. She spent almost four decades living and working in the Netherlands. She also used the mediums of drawing, painting, photography and film and created art objects and sculptures. One of the main themes of her art was light and motion. The rigorous, minimalist handling of her means as well as the intense concentration with which she performed within spaces of light and shadow are the most salient characteristics of her artistic work.

Pejac is a Spanish painter whose works include outdoor murals, often utilising trompe-l'œil techniques. Pejac is familiar with different styles, techniques, formats and mediums: "From miniature window drawings, striking site-specific interventions to elaborate replicas of classic masterpieces, [...]. Taking clever twists on familiar images and skill-fully reinventing the public space, Spain-based artist is touching sensitive social and environmental issues in a smart and poetic manner." Even though Pejac is skilled and capable of making remakes of classic masterpieces by Claude Monet, Eugène Delacroix, Katsushika Hokusai, or references to Lucio Fontana or Alberto Giacometti, he feels comfortable minimising his work to bare silhouettes or shadows when needed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diana Shpungin</span> Latvian multidisciplinary artist

Diana Shpungin is a Latvian-born American multidisciplinary artist. She is known for her work in drawing, sculpture, installation, performance, video, sound, and hand-drawn pencil animation. Her work explores non-traditional ideas of drawing through sculptural and time-based processes.

References

  1. ↑ LaSala, Anthony. "William Lamson." Photo District News, November 2004, 68+. Gale General OneFile (accessed April 2, 2020). https://gale.com
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Deitsch, Dina (April 9, 2015). "Floating Cabins and Shifting Landscapes: William Lamson in Conversation with Dina Deitsch". Art Journal.
  3. 1 2 3 "Noted Artist William Lamson to Speak as Part of Auerbach Lecture Series." US Official News, March 25, 2015. Gale OneFile: News (accessed April 2, 2020). https://gale.com
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Odom, Michael. "William Lamson: MARTY WALKER GALLERY." Artforum International, January 2010, 207+. Gale Academic OneFile (accessed April 2, 2020). https://gale.com
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Nicholson, Louise (June 2012). "How Sweet It Is". Interior Design. 83 (6): 223.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.