PROPOSAL by Gloria Lamson for 2018 Centrum Residency:
In the last year I’ve been inspired to review the photographs and artwork I’ve created in the last 45 years. With this residency I want to reflect upon and re-contextualize my artwork as a whole, with the fresh seeing that can come with distance and hindsight.
I’m requesting a Centrum artist residency to use the large studio upstairs in the 205 building from February 1st- March 4th 2018 (or whatever portion of that time I can have). My purpose is to create an installation as well as review, organize, and edit images of my art/photography work of the past 45 years. With fabric stapled from the west to east side of the 2 large north walls, I want to create a river-like form as a visual stream of my work and life. This structure would serve as a matrix to which I would then affix a selection of small prints of my artwork in relationship to each other and the time when they were created.
I have often envisioned the relationship between my life and artwork as a mobius strip, giving me the sense that my art and life are woven together through out time. This installation would be a navigable chart of my work and creative process that would allow back and forth reflection, at a glance. Allowing me to a chance to examine the joys and pathos, the hilltops and valleys various stages in my work. This installation would give me a ‘place’ to explore the personal art story of my life.
This Centrum studio time would support the work of editing and organizing my artwork for a self-published book (or books), which I will continue to work on after the residency.
To give you a sense of the kind of material I will be working with I am including the some of the images below.
Over the past few years I have used the form of a river in my three different “Life Stream” site responsive installations. Initially I developed the form during my artist residency at Playa in Southern Oregon, 2015 and included the following poem as a statement.
~ Life Stream~
I imagine,
our lives are like threads,
weaving through time.
Emerging at birth from an ocean of consciousness,
and returning again at death.
In between,
a mystery, we call life.
In between,
we dip in and out of that larger stream,
at times immersed, submerged,
renewed or humbled,
as the current carries us along.
In between,
we play with possibilities of who we are and who we might be,
with what we’ve been given
and what we choose.
Alone and together,
we weave the fabric of our lives.
~
I expanded upon this work for a solo exhibition at Peninsula College in Port Angeles, 2015.
In 2016 I created another version of “Life Stream” for the Shunpike Storefront Program for one of Amazon’s street front windows at South Lake Union in Seattle.
Some of my work in the past reflects my fascination with point to point linking (images below). As a kid when I saw the ‘connect the dot’ puzzles, in the newspaper, I often imagined that if only the connections were drawn in some precise way that some part of life’s mysteries would miraculously be revealed.
My work often grows out of a particular time and place. Centrum at Fort Worden is special place to which I have a deep connection. From my first artist residency in 2002 to having my art studio in the 205 building from 2011-2014. It seems like the perfect location to bring together past, present and…what’s next.
The images I want to review and edit begin with my black and white film photography from the 70’s such as the three images below.
And would include reviewing some 20 years of images of interactions with/in nature and installations in architectural environments, such as images below.
Current work can be seen at http://glorialamson.blogspot.com/ and an archive of selected past work at http://www.glorialamson.com.
