LAUREN WAS: We kept finding these lottery tickets littered
all over the ground.
And we started picking them up thinking that they were
somebody's lost wish, that they were this hope and dream
that they had, and then they tossed it away.
We started thinking about what those dreams actually meant
and what happens if you collected enough of those to
make that dream into a reality.
Wassaic's about two hours outside of the city.
We're the last step on the Harlem line.
And the Wassaic Project has a residency program, and we're
sculpture fellows here.
ADAM ECKSTROM: That's part of our deal as
being sculpture fellows.
We run the wood shop, and we can use
whatever we have in here.
We use this space.
A lot of the tools are--
about half the tools are ours and half the tools are theirs.
LAUREN WAS: We had just gotten married, and we were living in
the studio together and working side by side.
And we kept finding the lottery tickets
and collecting them.
We kept talking about what the heck we were going to
do with them all.
We felt like all those tickets were like the ghost of
somebody's dream.
And as we thought more about it, we decided we needed a
separation between Lauren Was as a sculptor and Adam
Eckstrom as a painter.
We decided that "Ghost of a Dream" was going to sort of
fit for our entire spectrum that we are planning to do as
a collaborative.
ADAM ECKSTROM: We have a crazy organization system.
We've kind of organized and we have a lot of Massachusetts,
because we spend a lot of time there as well, and a lot of
our donations are from there.
We have European ones, Minnesota ones because I'm
from there, so we go there and collect a lot.
LAUREN WAS: On the cards we're really interested in the
different way people scratch them too.
And we will go through each card and then separate them
even further by people who just do the little scratch, or
people who do a straight line, or people who
do the whole thing.
And that also sort of helps our patterning.
ADAM ECKSTROM: While we were collecting those, it was kind
of over the course of 2008.
Lauren was teaching at RISD sometimes.
And she offered this class called "Artist Opportunities,"
where they ask you to come in and build
a large-scale project.
And you get 10 students to help you build that project,
and you kind of teach them your skills.
They learn how to build a big project.
Well, Lauren asked if I would join her, and we could do the
class collaboratively.
And we had been talking about making something and
researching and thinking we wanted to make the first thing
people buy is a car.
So we were trying to think of what the most ridiculous car
people would buy.
And then we decided to make the Hummer H3.
LAUREN WAS: That was the first project I feel like we really
latched onto and connected together as a collaborative.
From the Hummer, we decided that we are going to start off
working together with this trilogy, the three things that
people most buy when they win the lottery.
And that was the dream home, the dream vacation,
and the dream car.
ADAM ECKSTROM: We were asked by Deitch Projects to make a
piece for the Deitch Parade.
We wanted to make this dream vacation, so we decided to
make a movable island.
So we made a couple palm trees and a wave and a tube that
sits on it, and one of us were going to ride on it.
And then we took a bunch of Casino noises and sampled all
these Casino noises and made the muzak that you would hear
at an all-inclusive vacation.
So it kind of sounded like this horrible techno
background music that came out of a speaker hanging off one
of the palm trees.
After that, we decided to build the dream home.
LAUREN WAS: And that was made out of $70,000 worth of
discarded lottery tickets.
And we made it when we were doing a six-month residency in
Basel, Switzerland.
ADAM ECKSTROM: We built a full-scale dining room to
represent the dream home because we didn't have enough
space or money or time to build a whole home.
And we figured like when you show yourself to other people,
usually you entertain in a dining room.
You kind of spend a lot of time decorating the dining
room or whatever.
And it was perfect that we were living in Basel.
So we were going to all these period rooms around Europe,
kind of seeing what the classic dream home would be.
That next vehicle we decided to make was a boat.
And the reason was we were going to Miami, and we wanted
to do a project during Art Miami.
So we made this little remote control boat, and we made it
really glitzy.
And we decided to drop it in at parties and in the ocean
during Art Miami.
South Beach is a really crazy place.
So you could be at a really fancy party, all VIP, movie
stars, and then you can see right past the fence there's a
boarded up hotel, and there's tons of people
squatting in there.
We took photographs of that.
And then we also took photographs of it driving
around in the ocean with actual yachts in the
background.
About a year and a half later we went to China.
When we first got to Beijing, we were noticing how many
Lamborghinis were in our neighborhood.
It was pretty crazy, because we didn't equate this amount
of wealth to everyday Chinese society.
LAUREN WAS: So when we were researching, we found in
China, when people won the lottery, they
would buy a new car.
And so we decided to make the Lamborghini when we were
seeing them tons.
And then two, we found out after doing some research that
just that year, China had surpassed Italy as being the
second top buyer of Lamborghinis.
ADAM ECKSTROM: Second to the US.
LAUREN WAS: This car is made out of Chinese and American
scratch-off tickets.
ADAM ECKSTROM: When we made the Hummer, we went to the
Hummer dealership.
We rolled out papers, like butcher paper, and did
rubbings and measured it all.
But we didn't have the opportunity to do that,
because we really wanted to make a Countach, partially
because I had a Countach poster as a kid.
Since we were doing a Countach, we had to do it by
specs from the Lamborghini site and
Lamborghini lovers and stuff.
So we just kind of built it via the specs.
LAUREN WAS: There's a lot of projects that
we work on at once.
And there's a lot of things that we are planning for the
future that we're trying to collect for or we're trying to
organize and build.
So there are several projects always going on at one time.
The text work started off because Adam and I were sort
of handing papers back and forth to each other.
And we thought about the text as sort of like a mantra,
where we were writing one word over and over and over again.
And then when you step back from it, it would read like a
different word.
ADAM ECKSTROM: They relate directly to the collages.
Because the way we amass the words to make a whole other
thing, I think, operates in the same way
the collages operate.
From a distance, you might read "desire." And then as you
get close, you start to read "resent" and "regret."
LAUREN WAS: We're in Dumbo, Brooklyn, at the
Smack Mellon Studios.
We have a year-long residency here.
ADAM ECKSTROM: We're doing almost all our work here.
In the past year or so, we've been collecting the lottery
tickets a little less and all these other materials more.
We do a lot of collecting on Craigslist for books.
We got 1,100 romance novels, and this woman was selling.
It was her mother just passed away.
So we took these 1,100 books and made an eight foot by 12
foot collage.
So it was pretty much a portrait of this woman.
Around the same time, we got a donation from somebody who
gave us a bunch of baseball cards.
This piece is called "Land of the Free, Home of the Braves."
And it's all the Indians, Reds, and
Braves baseball cards.
So we researched where-- like the patterns in Ohio and in
Atlanta of the Native Americans who used to live
there, put that together, and made this collage.
The business cards from Nevada are kind of
our most recent work.
So we went on a trip and collected all these
prostitutes' business cards.
This piece at the end is called "Four Queens."
LAUREN WAS: The outer edge is all made out of Harrah's
playing cards.
And then the inner part is four ladies of the night.
I feel like a lot of our work is about seduction, and then
there's a slight repulsion when you see what
it's made out of.
ADAM ECKSTROM: I think we both solidly feel like this is a
full career for both of us together.
LAUREN WAS: And "Ghost of a Dream" has pretty much taken
over our artist practice.
We're really focused on what we make as a
collaborative team.
[BOAT MOTOR WHIRRING]