2016 - Present

The screen is framed within the flush surface of a pedestal, the video is framed by a soft black edge and then framed again by the book and framed again by the artist's hands. A black rectangle gives way to the suds of a car wash. What is contained? Nature books laid flat and shot from above act as landscapes in relief that can be felt, a finger traces the edge of a cliff in a desert or appears to etch the crevasses in the snow on a mountain. Seeing is believing. The hands are the figure to the ground, performing as in playing each page like an instrument. The hands are actors, performing an improvisational dance guided by the image and keeping time with ambient music of the room. Brown noise is punctuated by the fading drums at the end of a song. 

“Body the body, the body, the body

The body, the body, the body, the head

I'm part of the body, I'm part of the problem

I'm a part of my body.“

Doom-scrolling, web pages pile up searching for news about a mother orca grieving the loss of her newborn calf. New search, new window, new tab, new me, new day, not. From a distance rows of windows in an apartment building, in one window someone’s playing with a baby, it’s oddly silent, as if in a cave, room tone.

The spray of fins splashing in the crashing waves is rendered digital noise by a magnifying glass cursor, zooming in, zooming out, zooming in and out. New search, flipping through book pages, what's she looking for? Frantically until it’s as if the pages turn to tar, sticking together, redacting themselves, slowing her down. Feelings are not facts. “Sometimes you gotta close a door to open a window.” 

The hand imitates the campy glamoring of Dracula, performing horror. The performance of horror. Great horror performances, Shelley Duvall, Mia Farrow, Linda Blair, mother and child. “You and me together now.”  

A gorilla admires a human baby behind its glass enclosure. 

A parrot keeps a pacing vigil by its dying owner.

Orcas are attacking ships.

Save our souls.

“Is there not, perhaps, some value to tending to the work of life with both hands. To caring for children and mourning and taking care of a house and family and the sick and dying. To turning to our lives and families and people with our whole selves and not reserving something in us, to stand apart, unravaged and still capable of producing culture. Is there not some value, some artistic value even. Is there nothing for which the cessation of production is justified. Is there not some part, integral to the making of our essential work, that we allow to remain intact by letting all of our labor serve love, serve life, serve living things and their needs in life and death, by letting ourselves be subsumed by grief. Even for years. Could there not be work that can be made in no other way, from no other place than on the other side of those years.” - Jenny Nichols, Soloway Gallery, Press Release: Several Years Have Passed.

In Reprise an undulating closed Verrazano bridge creates a grinding melodic score, a mantra for entropy, disembodied fear. I let the found material speak for me asking "I mean where the fuck should I really even start?" How do you begin to talk about the depth of racialized trauma and loss? I am the crying fat little penguin, funny and sad. I am the mom in Terminator 2, mad and unhinged. “You don't know what it's like to really create something, to create a life. To feel it growing inside you, all you know how to create is death and destruction.” – “Mom!” I juxtapose calamity with the banality of the redacted LIFE magazine images, you get to see what's underneath the paint only in glimpses. Here the infinity of space is restrained by the edges of the redaction. How these narratives butt up against the spaces in between, is also the subject, the matter, and creates a necessary slippage between what does and should happen. Nina Simone's hands making magic on the ivories, friend’s hands frame the night sky imagining a limitless future. The sky's the limit, isn't it?

“Williams considers overture in its dual definition: mutually as a type of introduction and an orchestral precursor to a performance. Williams’s redactions take us from a cinematic space to a cosmic space, a blackness that in taking over the screen becomes so all-encompassing in its encryption of information that the only place left to go is up and into the stars, a constellation that proposes a celestial afterlife of Black femmehood, held tenderly in its expansiveness.” – Legacy Russell, The Kitchen: Video Viewing Room.

“Reply, 2017, captures Williams at a patio bar dancing with a bunch of wasted white women lip-syncing to Nelly’s “Hot In Herre.” Racist YouTube responses to footage of the 2015 McKinney pool-party incident—where a young black woman, Dajerria Becton, was tackled by a police officer—fade in and out of the foreground. One of these commenters writes, “A bunch of out of control Nigglets. . . . Cops doing there [sic] job.” Galling stupidity is certainly one way of stoking a smart artist’s creative fire.” — Nicole Kaack, Artforum