1708 Gallery is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, To the Source: William Lamson and Steve Gurysh, on view June 6 through July 13. Join us for a gallery talk and opening reception on Thursday, June 6, from 6 to 8 p.m. The talk will begin at 6:30 p.m.

To the Source: William Lamson and Steve Gurysh considers notions of exploration, interdependence, and survival. Through video, sculpture, and installation, Gurysh and Lamson investigate our relationships with the natural world, using artistic inquiry to suspend cultural binaries separating what we consider scientific or spiritual, human or nature, aesthetic or functional. Dispensing with the trappings of orthodoxy, the artists suggest a present necessity for rigorous wonder.

William Lamson’s video work Action for the Delaware features footage of the artist standing on the surface of the Delaware River. The video contrasts shots of Lamson’s floating, slowly rotating figure, rigidly standing on a submerged vessel, against clips in which he has fallen into the river and desperately struggles to stand atop the floating base. Like an undiscovered extreme sport, Action for the Delaware simultaneously brings to mind the statuesque, land art, and natural history.

In the vein of artist predecessors who hybridized the languages of sculpture and biology like Mark Dion and Joseph Beuys, Steve Gurysh’s Projected Wetlands is a sprawling solar-powered drawing machine that measures local air quality using living lichen, a fog machine, a custom-machined printer, and urine (among other errata). Off the grid and on a tangent, Projected Wetlands captures the imagination like the work of a visionary doomsday prepper.

William Lamson is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in video, photography, performance and sculpture. Since graduating from the Bard MFA program in 2006, his work has been shown at The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, MOMA P.S.1, and the Museum of Contempoary Art Denver, among others. In 2012 he completed two site-specific installations for Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, NY.

Based in Pittsburgh, PA, Steve Gurysh received his MFA from Carnegie Mellon in 2013. His work is concerned with contemporary encounters of energy–phenomena which emerge from the everyday to the miraculous, from the municipal to the mythological. His work has been exhibited in places such as La Société des Arts Technologiques in Montréal, the Center for the Study of the End of Things in Charlottesville, VA, the center of the Allegheny River in Pittsburgh, as part of the floating exhibition platform The Drift, which Gurysh co-founded, and at extremely high altitudes.

For more information about the artists, please visit their websites: www.williamlamson.com and www.stevegurysh.com.

1708 Gallery’s current exhibition season is generously supported in part by Jay Barrows and Cindy Neuschwander, Page and Sandy Bond, Richard Douglas and Suzanna Fields, Josh and Sarah Eckhardt, John Freeman, Kathryn Henry-Choisser, Susan and John Jamieson, Jillian Krupski, Celia Rafalko and Rick Sample, Bill and Pam Royall, the Virginia Commission for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.