Blog Post 5

I found Will Lamson to be a very interesting artist.  I liked his artist talk a lot and was appreciative he broke with the familiar format of an artist lecture.  He mostly focused on a couple of his projects and just touched on others. He also spent the majority of his time talking about his most recent project and was very open with the fact that he had not yet reconciled and processed all parts of that piece. By going in depth on a couple of projects, we were allowed to see more of Will’s process as an artist instead of just the end product. I enjoyed learning about how his concepts emerged and his determination to get the work done.  He talked about having the idea for his piece Excavations, but getting his proposal rejected by a show in Miami.  It was a huge revelation for Will to contact ArtPrize in Michigan, and realize that if he was willing to fund his project, he could do it.  This freed him up to make how and what he wanted.  It was really helpful to hear about an artist’s process from conception to execution and I was grateful that he was so open to talking about all parts of this process. Although I liked much of Will’s work, and I particularly found his Walden pond piece beautiful, I had a lot of questions about ego, subject, and artist as genius when listening to Will and learning about his work.  I am interested in that line between confidence and ego.  When listening to Will talk about Excavations, there was something in the idea that he knew he wanted to pursue at all costs.  For that project, he altered an abandoned concrete slab and turned it into to a sculpture, but for his project Hydrologies, Will watered a strip of the land in the Atacama Desert to try to produce an artificial bloom.  Even though he only added water, I felt as though it was much more potentially dangerous to alter an ecosystem in the wild than to cut up a concrete slab.  I think Will is exploring these concepts of human power versus the power of nature in many of his projects, and I am interested in why some projects feel beautiful and appropriate, while others feel intrusive to nature.