William Lamson – Bio

William Lamson is a Brooklyn based artist, interested in photography, sculpture and performance. Using simple materials he creates structures and scenarios full of pathos and humour.

With a 24-minute video of 33 short performances and accompanying photographic images, Lamson’s series Actions (Stills 2009) documents the fates of numerous ill-fated black balloons. In contrast to his “scientific” approach, invoked by a stark white background and serious demeanour, the equipment and activities he depicts are unsophisticated and somewhat improbable. His understated “actions” employ low-tech props such as darts, ropes and pellet guns, or simply gravity’s unavoidable pull, and more often than not end badly for the balloons.

Lamson combines the amateur’s meager budget and compensatory surfeit of imagination with the whimsical and haphazard nature of helium balloons, to create a dialogue of both hope and failure. By enacting a series of grand, though often self-defeating experiments, his work addresses the universality of human struggle and how we create meaning through adversity. With his fictional explorations, Lamson hopes to elicit the sense of hope, possibility and wonder that motivates amateurs and artists alike.

Season08 (Stills 2008-2009) featured two new video works Emerge and Tundra. In Emerge brightly coloured balloons appear from below the surface of a vast expanse of water in an unexpectedly poetic dance. In Tundra there is a dance of a different nature, this time in a northern hemisphere landscape of snow.

Lamson's artwork often explores the glorified narratives that accompany scientific discoveries, feats of athleticism and heroic legends through the perspective of the amateur, who is motivated by love for the activity and a desire to achieve, but is limited by a lack of physical and technical expertise. In the resulting videos human struggle becomes the central component.

In 2007 Stills Gallery exhibited three short black and white video loops by Lamson including Jump. Lamson's white-suited protagonists are hopeful and indefatigable. Against the simple black background of night they perpetually chase enlarged paper airplanes or push glowing white orbs into sky, as if attempting to return the moon to its proper place. His protagonist's arduous endeavours offer the perpetual hope for transcendence, however flawed their undertaking may be. Although these disarming videos are at once both absurd and humorous, they manage to convey a profound sense of humanity.

In a statement Lamson writes, "If flight is a representation of divine possibility, open to anyone willing to try, then the same is true for art making. A paper airplane or a drawing on paper are both entry points to a kind of creative experience." By enacting these grand though often self-defeating undertakings, Lamson addresses the universal issue of human struggle and how we create meaning through it.

William Lamson lives in Brooklyn, New York. He has participated in many group exhibitions including Flight of Fancy at the Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 2007 and the Young Portfolio Acquisition 2006 at Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts, Japan. His works have also been exhibited in Germany, South Africa and throughout the US. In 2005 he was selected by Photo District News as one of 30 Emerging Photographers to Watch.