In The Roaring Garden
Film and Photography by William Lamson
06.10.2015 – 31.10.2015
In 2014, William Lamson was commissioned by the DeCordova Museum to make a new work for a show called Walden, revisited. The exhibition explored the legacy of Walden, a book written by the famous 19th century American writer Henry David Thoreau. Composed during Thoreau’s semi-hermitic sabbatical in a one-room cabin that he built on the shore of Walden Pond, Walden devotes long passages to carefully describing the natural occurrences that he witnessed every day. In relation to this almost photographic description of nature, Lamson began to think about Thoreau’s cabin itself as a device for seeing, an idea that eventually led to the premise In the Roaring Garden.
Shown on a monitor in the front gallery, In the Roaring Garden, 2014, is an experimental video shot entirely within a floating camera obscura built in the form of an 8×8 foot black cabin. Inside this camera obscura, he constructed a 1:5 scale model of Thoreau’s cabin.