Ghost of a Dream

Ghost of a Dream

Ghost of a Dream
Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was

b. 1974 | 1977       STUDIO IN BROOKLYN, NY

NorthEast Region of USA
Ghost of a Dream
What do you want from life, and how do you hope to achieve it? Artists Adam Eckstrom and Lauren Was, working in collaboration as Ghost of a Dream, use lottery tickets, romance novels, and other collaged materials in their work to investigate these questions that underpin our everyday lives. In Forever, Almost, thousands of lottery tickets accumulate one atop the other, their eye-catching color practically vibrating with frenetic energy. The tickets create an interlocking diamond pattern—one that could conceivably be infinitely repeated.
 
Crucially, the artists only collect and collage discarded lottery tickets. Each of these cheerful slips of paper represents a dream deferred, a big hope dashed in a tiny way. Each small setback, however, becomes enmeshed within the beauty of the overall structure, in an effusive pattern reminiscent of a Persian rug. Like the just-beyond-reach dream, the seductive beauty of the image persists, somehow more than the sum of its constituent parts.

 

The reason we call ourselves Ghost of a Dream is that we make everything out of the ephemera created from people trying to attain their hopes and dreams—usually in a too-quick method.

— Ghost of a Dream