Hunt and Gather
William Lamson
In the Video Lounge
Friday, November 7th - November 30th, 2008
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
Over the last year I have been working on a series of photographs and videos that engage with the urban landscape by making temporary sculptures in the street with found objects and inexpensive materials. While exploring the area around my studio in Gowanus Brooklyn, I began to think about the sneakers I saw hanging from power lines as interventions as well, since they mark the visual landscape of the city. Although there are many explanations as to what these hanging shoes might signify, drugs for sale, gang territory, a marker where someone died, there is only one feasible explanation for how they got there: someone threw them. Regardless of what the previous owner intended by this gesture, the hanging shoes represent the last act they performed before giving them up to public space. This gesture extends for as long as the shoes stay on the wire. Given to city, and they hang there, in a perpetual state of limbo, until they fall or are taken down.
Hunt and Gather is about engaging with another person’s act of intervention. By cutting down shoes and trading them for the ones that I am wearing (which are also ones that I cut down from somewhere else) I am able to both preserve the original mark in the landscape and change it slightly. Since each pair of shoes that I cut down is later thrown back up in a different location, the original gesture is extended to a new place, and the original mark is maintained in an altered form. This process of redistribution creates a series of nearly invisible marks in the landscape, a constellation of actions and reactions. There is an existential quality in both the futile exercise of redistributing hanging sneakers, and performing a violent act to make an almost invisible mark. Yet equally important to this work is the adolescent pleasure of shooting arrows and throwing shoes.
William Lamson is a Brooklyn based artist who works in video, photography, performance and sculpture. His work addresses issues of masculinity, amateurism, science, play and the quixotic quest for personal heroism that accompanies these subjects. He received his MFA from Bard in 2006 and his BA from Dartmouth in 2000. His work has been shown at P.S.1, The Brooklyn Museum, Pierogi Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe among others.
