William Lamson

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.

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.

Lamson received his undergraduate education at Dartmouth College and graduated with his B.A. in 2000.

Soon after, he went on to pursue his M.F.A. at Bard College, graduating in 2006.

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.

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.

The precision in his process and documentation suggesting the precariousness of these contraptions, the meticulousness needed to produce a satisfactory outcome.

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.

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.

Sea Drawings were created in Coliumo, Chile on a cliff side overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

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.

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.

He follows the path of the sun moves through the sky, hence the chosen title.

Lamson was named a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and received grants from the Shifting Foundation and the Experimental Television Center.

As an interdisciplinary artist, Lamson uses a wide range of mediums, including video, photography, performance, and sculpture.

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.

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.

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."

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.