Photo: Time is Like The East River, courtesy of the artist
Time is like the East River, a series of elegant installations by William Lamson opened Thursday night at Artspace, New Haven. The show, curated by Liza Statton, features objects and documentation of performance work in the form of photographs and video. Brooklyn-based Lamson will be familiar to Artspace aficionados through his Long Shot installation which has been up in The Lot since September (and runs through to January 2010), here seen documented in the front room of the exhibition space.
The show is an ambitious one, in that it sets out to put several discrete works, minimal and performative in nature, into a gallery setting, and to have them coalesce enough to create a sense of unity to the exhibition. This is all the more challenging as Artspace’s galleries feature rooms and spaces which are quite separate from one-another. The task of providing enough cohesion without being over-literal is a delicate one.
Upon entering this exhibit, it is a bit of a cipher. The works seem vastly different- aesthetically aligned but not evidently related. You really have to look, and put it together yourself, which is a complement. I really dislike work that declares itself wholly as one big idea, leaving no room for nuance, layers of meaning, space for the viewer. Lamson includes us by not doing all the work for us: though if one needs clues, Statton's concise paragraphs which make up the wall labels offer kernels of insight for the lost. Pleasingly, the curator’s wall labels do not attempt to describe or explain the whole work, just offer some insights, perspective and a bit of background.
The name, Time is like the East River comes from a work Lamson did involving a canoe he altered by dividing it into two smaller vessels which get rejoined again after being separately paddled out from either bank in New York's East River. We are presented with this as the exhibition’s title, yet there are key works here that have no obvious connections to either canoes, or the East River. Time is what turns out to be the glue, the binder of this exhibition.
Photo: Time is Like The East River, courtesy of the artist
Around the corner, in Gallery one, is Timeline, a work which again references drawing, lines and the spanning of space. Like his East River project, Lamson starts at both ends of a distance to be spanned, in this case a vast wall. This surface is studded with holes stuffed with firecrackers, forming a horizontal line.
As with the arrows in the opposite gallery, this work creates a linear mark across a space by breaking down the flat surface of the planar wall the work rests upon. The crackers were lit, eventually meeting in the middle. What is left is a dancing ragged line of burn marks and holes. Lamson evokes drawing as a pulling of forces meeting in the middle: the line is the residue of an action or movement in space. He is ” drawing", in the sense of making a point into a line, pulling, as one does to make a small lump of metal into a wire strand.
A video in the back shows both timeline and the arrow work in process, really essential viewing for understanding both installations.
At one point I wondered if Lamson had had trouble filling the gallery’s vast spaces. My least favorite room(gallery 5) had his canoe-half displayed upright like a sculpture with a clock positioned next to it, the second hand moving backwards. The clock turns out to be set to measure slack tide, the brief period of calm on the river when Lamson and his colleague were able to cross on such small crafts. This is interesting, but in no way evident just by looking at canoe and clock, making it, for me at least, problematic. Since the canoe half and the clock are the only pieces in the room they play off of each other, and while the canoe offered a surprisingly monumental sculptural presence, with the clock the installation as a whole became a tad hokey. Maybe for an exhibition about time and it’s measurements it would seem a natural choice, but given the elliptical nature of his other work, it just seemed too blunt and obvious. I would have preferred the canoe out in the space with the other East River documents, as he did with the paddle, placing it casually leaning up against the wall. This seemed totally right: physical corroboration of the events shown in the photos and an art piece that is also a tool.
Photo: Time is Like The East River, courtesy of the artist
What is perhaps my favorite piece was tucked away in a darkened room in the very back gallery. A video, titled Drip (So are the Days of Our Lives), is shown projected onto a wall of what appears to be river silt (or cement) compacted into a vase-like shape and place on a funnel over an empty two liter bottle in a white tiled space. This video is accompanied by a soundtrack of sort of slapping or dripping noises, from a very close-up microphone. Gradually the silt starts to slide and collapse into the bottle, at first creeping slowly, then dropping in bigger and more watery blobs at a faster and faster rate. Acting as a kind of hourglass the piece again marks time and passage, going from one form and state to another through simple means. This work functions as accompaniment to the canoe journey, offering a minute, up-close version of the vast dispersion of matter across the river bed, over vast periods of time. It could be construed as a model of sorts, mimicking the epic on a very modest scale.
I really admire Lamson's use of simple materials and the graceful structures he manages to make from them. The archery frame, the halved canoe, the soda-bottle hourglass, all are cleanly put together in a spare functional way, without extra elaboration. They are matter of fact: devices with which to render time visible.
After moving myself through the exhibition, things accreted, a logic and order became visible. There is a real interconnectedness to his work which reveals itself only by slowing down to the pace of the work and really looking. For some, this will not be the easiest show to grasp, and certainly not one for someone looking for instant gratification, but neither it is not cold or off-putting. I noticed a nice phenomenon occurring during the opening: people, strangers, were looking at the art and discussing it with each other, analyzing ingredients, discussing motives. Now, to my eyes, inciting curiosity and dialogue is (to borrow from Tom Waits) a rare and a copacetic gift.
Time is like the East River
runs through December 19th at
Artspace
50 Orange St New Haven, CT 06510
GALLERY HOURS
Tuesday-Thursday • 12-6PM
Friday-Saturday • 12-8PM
Sunday-Monday • CLOSED
203.772.2709 • phone
203.772.0850 • fax
info[at]artspacenh.org
For further information visit: http://www.artspacenh.org/
A group show with my work in it, including this site-specific installation "Ligeia", is currently up at the John Slade Ely House in New Haven.
This work is, for whatever reason, quite difficult to capture on film- the light coming from the windows,which in real life is glorious, makes the interior look dark and dingy in photos...
Ely House is really beautiful without any art in it-full of window seats, diamond paned glass and lovely old woodwork, it's rooms feel rich and full even devoid of furniture. 
Here is another, as-of-yet untitled work- marker and pencil on commercially produced tags with copper nails, made during the final days of 2011.
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