Interview with Artist and Bike Messenger Ian Lorson

This post was written by Kate Barrett, who you'll remember from her guest-blogging stint here back in July, when she wrote about Heavy Metal Parking Lot, King of Porn and mining your dreams for ideas.

Bike messengers are part of that great flood of moving parts that pulses through a city's streets: cars, buses, commuters, tourists, and so forth. And from their unique vantage point, messengers tend to experience a city as few others do.

As a bike messenger in DC for several years, Ian Lorson turned his experiences into art. He studied sculpture in graduate school at Ohio University, and his paintings pack a tactile, visceral punch. Much of his art is layered with fine details (some pieces take years to complete) that weave found and everyday objects, maps, even pieces of his bike. The result is a distinct and personal view of the city; here is a picture of a piece of his titled, "Attempt at Protection II":

(View a gallery of Lorson's map paintings on Flickr.)

I asked Ian what he’d do if he were a desk monkey like me stuck in the office all day; he shrugged his shoulders, and said he’d probably make art about being a monkey stuck in the office all day.

Ian recently moved to Charlottesville, VA, but before he left town, he showed me some of his art and talked about leaving a job and a city that he loves. What follows is an edited transcript of our email exchange.

What inspires your work?

It's hard to look at the motivations I get to work as "inspiration," which conjures up images of the "inspirational" aisle at book stores, greeting cards, and John Tesh radio shows. I definitely have moments where something happens, and a layer or wrinkle of my city, or life, or species is revealed. ..The underlying aspect of these events usually concerns geography and our place in it, or relationships between people in general.

Can you describe how your life as a courier feeds into your work?

Being a courier affects the content of my work because of the constant focus it requires on where I am, the space between other things in the environment and myself. The often raw nature of being exposed to the city and its inhabitants, and the natural environment itself, gives plenty of food for thought. Riding a bike the way couriers often do produces opposing feelings of jealousy, awe, admiration, and anger, frustration, or sometimes violence in those people who observe us at work. People frequently express these feelings in a variety of ways, which is always thought provoking. Spending so much time on my bike has influenced me to use bike parts in my art, as well as the maps of my locations, and objects I find or am given throughout my day.

What inspired the “Attempt at Protection” series?

Attempt at Protection I came about because I'd decided that I wanted to bolt wire cages to a panel, with most of the cages being tied at the base and the others (the central set) being tied down over their bubbles. Before making a distinction between these groups, I was simply working with interesting or aesthetic materials. But by separating them, it made me think about groups of people, who they are related to, marriage, birth, abortion, divorce, and how those things change our families and lives. So the composition had started before I knew where I was going with it, or what it was about to me.

"The composition started before I knew where I was going with it, or what it was about to me."

On the other hand, Attempt at Protection II had its idea before it had its form. My friend had commented that her father had seen me riding around town on his way to a bookstore, and that I looked "the same". Hearing this, I felt observed, surveilled, powerless, immature. An odd reaction since I was working a job I liked, I was finally completely independent, and he had no control over my movements. I wanted to know so badly where he had seen me exactly, to regain a measure of control, to limit the contamination of his gaze to one area of town, but she didn't remember. So I sat down with my map, found the 9 bookstores in the area I deliver in, and found I could fit those maps onto 5 panels while keeping the images a decent size.

Knowing that the cages would reappear in this work, I began thinking of them less as people and their histories, and more as individual versions of myself. Each bubble trying to keep out this man's view of me, and by extension anyone's view who judges me. Of course that's impossible, so the bubbles are crusty, faulted, and incomplete. There is more than one cage per panel, as if by being in more than one place at a time (a courier's aspiration in some ways), I'll make enough money to "count" to those people, or just be too fast too see, or be able to avoid the power of their gaze, or win their admiration with my talent for avoiding collisions.

"Experiences my courier friends and I have had, or seen: getting hit, being high, and seeing a business man jump into traffic to avoid having a homeless man vomit on him..."

The panels have layered writing on them about experiences my courier friends and I have had or seen: getting hit, being high, seeing a business man jump into traffic to avoid having a homeless man vomit on him. All these experiences play in my mind as I ride through town, mental YouTube activated by my location...but they grew quiet till I "escaped" the gaze of my friend's father.

What will you miss about DC?

I will miss the size of this place, how flat it is, the Metro, big climbing gyms, and hearing so many languages in a day.

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Got questions for Ian? Email him at loopwhispers@yahoo.com - or, share your thoughts about his work using the comments feature below. Do you recognize the DC you know in his paintings? If you were making a map of the city in the "Lorson style," what kinds of emblematic objects would you include?