William Lamson: Between Now and Forever

Between Now and Forever

New work by William Lamson

Gallery Walkthrough at Antenna with Artist:

In collaboration with Loyola University, Press Street’s Antenna Gallery is proud to present Between Now and Forever, a show of recent video and photographic works made by artist William Lamson in the Mojave Desert, California and White Sands, New Mexico between 2011 and 2013. Each of the works involves a performative intervention within the natural landscape, a gesture that shifts our perception of time and space.  In the video Between Now and Forever, a tire rolls across  a dry lakebed as it is pushed perpetually forward by the wind. Made from a single continuous thirteen-minute tracking shot, the video is structured around two simultaneous events separated within the video frame by the horizon. In the foreground, a tire rolls towards the camera, mysteriously animated by an unseen force, while in the distance the sun sets – almost imperceptibly –  in real time.   At some moments, the image appears to be completely still, in others it seems as if the horizon, sun and tire are fixed in place and surface of the earth is actually receding under them.  The video becomes a record of a subtly changing relative environment; a shift in speed, perspective, light and the passing imprint of a tire track in the lakebed floor are evidence that time is in fact moving forward and that sun and the tire are moving perpetually away from each other, despite the paradoxical appearance otherwise.

In the two Untitled videos, the camera again follows a subject as it moves with the wind through the landscape.   Set within the shifting fields of gypsum sand dunes, Untitled (White Sands) documents the artist walking in two large circles around the camera as it pans with him.  As the sand-filled air erases the distinction between earth and sky, the walking figure becomes a constant form, his movement forward creating an endless loop within a undefined field.  In contrast, Untitled (Mylar) reverses the relationship between a fixed subject and a changing background. As the camera races alongside a blowing piece of mylar, the silver sheet becomes an animated sculptural object, constantly changing shape as it is propelled by the wind. Beneath it, the complex network of cracked lines in the earth created over months of drying are reduced to a flickering textural field.  In the two photographs, mylar is again the subject, however this time it is used not to shift our perception of time but rather to compress the vast space in which it appears.  Stretched tightly across the desert floor, the 100-foot strips of mylar create a mirror surface to reflect the evening sky.  This gesture flattens the image, turning the reflective space into both an object in the landscape and a window through it.

William Lamson was born in Arlington, Virginia, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum (NYC), The Dallas Museum of Art (TX), the Houston Museum of Fine Arts (TX), and the Progressive Art Collection (Cleveland, OH), among others. His work has been exhibited in the US and internationally, including at P.S.1 (NYC) Kunsthalle Erfurt, Germany,  and he has recently completed site specific sculptural works for The Indianapolis Musuem of Art and Storm King Art Center.  He completed his MFA at Bard College and is a recent MacDowell Fellow.