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The Kitchen: On Screen | Video Viewing Room
This Video Viewing Room features Abbey Williams’s Intermission (2018) and Overture (2020), alongside a text written by Legacy Russell and excerpts from films that the artist references in her work.
This presentation is organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director, and Chief Curator.
For its first Video Viewing Room of the 2022 season, The Kitchen presents Abbey Williams and her two moving image works Overture (2020) and Intermission (2018). Across these works the artist negotiates the structural question of a historical archive as a conflicted site of simultaneous erasure and protective enclosure, alongside systems of visual culture as they intersect with Black womxnhood, complicating what is necessarily seen and what is necessarily left unseen. Williams shapes intimate anti-portraits that, in directly refusing Black figural representation, apply what feminist author and activist bell hooks terms an “oppositional gaze,” a counternarrative and counterviewership that disrupts the power embedded in the act of looking. (Read more)
Hyperallergic, Through Video and Collage, Abbey Williams Inverts the Paradigm of White Hegemony by Justin Kamp, March 30, 2021.
In her book Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison describes how representations of whiteness and Blackness function in the American literary canon. “Images of blackness can be evil and protective, rebellious and forgiving, fearful and desirable- all of the self-contradictory features of the self,” Morrison writes. “Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable.” This blank impenetrability is the manifestation of white hegemony, Morrison posits, while Blackness functions as its “reined-in, bound, suppressed and repressed” shadow. In her solo show Vignette, now on view at Sargent’s Daughters, Abbey Williams inverts this paradigm, reconfiguring whiteness not as a central monolith but as a narrowly-defined terrain over which Blackness can spill — unbounded, expansive, liquid. Across a series of works that incorporate video, multimedia collage, and works on paper, Williams explores how Black affective space persists within and outside the constricted frame of the white gaze. (Read more)
SOLOWAY through April 29; 348 South Fourth Street, Williamsburg, soloway.info. The latest entry in this South Williamsburg gallery’s always interesting lineup is “Several Years Have Passed,” which its curator, Jenny Nichols, named after a title card in Marcel Carné’s World War II-era film “Children of Paradise.” Its magnetic poles are two enormous unstretched paintings by Annette Wehrhahn, which combine cartoonish figurative outlines with storms of color to convey both grand ambition and intense ambivalence, and two coolly incisive videos by Abbey Williams. In “La Mulatta,” Ms. Williams layers an image of her own face, with slowly blinking eyes, over a photograph of a 19th-century terra-cotta bust of a bound slave.
–The New York Times, 12 Galleries to Visit Now in Brooklyn and Queens, By WILL HEINRICH, APRIL 26, 2018.
Patty Chang and Abbey Williams in the Brooklyn Rail as a part of Amy Sadao ‘s and Susette Min’s Abolition of a Catagory.
We brings to mind Fred Moten referring to Eduard Glissant’s phrase “to consent not to be a single being” as “essentially a maternal relation.” His maternal refers to “the possibility of a general socialization of the maternal”.
The maternal is always more than one, when one becomes a mother, there is a feeling of always being for multiple.
"We" has been so over/misused.
There are a lot of We’s
We as women.
We as mothers.
We as artists.
We as POC.
We as beings.
We as entanglement.
We is not always true—detachment has to happen and it is slow. The mothering job is also the slow cleave for the sake of everyone’s sanity, which is a long process. Or is cleaving on the part of the child? Does mother even feel like one’s own self? Is it a temporary state or is it forever?
In our work as non-studio artists, the work involves researching, reading, watching, listening, living, feeling, amassing, connecting. By the time you’re standing on something, you barely have anything.
WALLACH TALKS | DEAD LECTURER / DISTANT RELATIVE: SYMPOSIUM
Che Gossett, Eunsong Kim, Ajay Kurian, Susette Min, and Abbey Williams join curator Genji Amino to reflect on the questions of history and memory, race and aesthetics raised by the exhibition Dead Lecturer / distant relative, which presents a selection of works by Asian American and African American artists whose approaches to abstraction provided alternatives to prevailing vocabularies for representation and resistance during the social movements of the 1960s and 70s. Together we will ask the question: How do we recall the voices of those for whom art history has never represented either a reliable record or the proper horizon of address?
(More information HERE)
“Offering a critique of power, race, and gender, Abbey Williams’ video La Mulatta (2007) overlays transparent footage of the artist as she mimics the posture of a 19th-century slave bust by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. This haunting gesture gives life to the sculpture: her edges are blurred by the overlay, her eyes blink. The artist mimics Carpeaux’s baroque pose, acknowledging the ongoing impact of a history of subjugated bodies while also occupying and altering the images that male European artists have used to control women of color. ”
–The Brooklyn Rail, ArtSeen: Garden Dwellers by Alexandra Hammond, July 14, 2017.
As Q-Tip once said, Joni Mitchell never lies, at least, apparently, not to middle-aged gay men, the demographic occupying the preponderance of wall space in this group show of artists inspired by the singer and her music. Keith Mayerson straightforwardly transcribes album art in watercolor. Rupert Goldsworthy appends a predictable, if heartfelt, coming-of-age text to an image derived from the LP The Hissing of Summer Lawns; while John Kelly photographs himself in Joni drag, though his pictures lack the haunting magic of his live performances. Erik Hanson’s angular abstractions, resembling Cubist paint chips, are meant to evoke the duration of listening to a record; here, three flank his Expressionistic portrait of a walleyed Mitchell. Chris Bogia’s blowup in colored yarn of the cover of Blue hangs between a suspended pair of carved wood eyes dripping blown-glass tears above a white ceramic doodad on a rug, mixing the camp craftiness of fandom with the symbolic kitsch of home decor.
Yet for all the male adulation, women in the exhibition channel the lady of the canyon with more affecting verve. Melanie Schiff's Reflecting Pool, an image of Blue floating in a trash-strewn swimming pool, despite its dappled sunlight, encapsulates a forlorn sense of abandonment. In the video California/Blue, Abbey Williams sits in various Ikea display rooms, crooning sweetly along with the music playing on her earphones. Amid hanging price tags and voracious shoppers, her actions seem, like some of Mitchell’s finest tunes, a plaintive protest against the consumerism and obliviousness of the everyday.
–Time Out New York, Review: Joni Mitchell by Joseph R. Wolin, January 28, 2011
Page from Greater New York 2005 catalogThe New York City subway provides a stage set for fantasies to play on. People move in and out of stations, wait on platforms, enter and exit trains– the human pulse, like the rumble of the train itself, is clearly felt. Bodies are in motion, and every single body also represents a life, although an unknowable one as only the physical form is apprehended. From this, though, we might construct an image of those we see. Who are they? Where are they going? That drama takes place in the mind, but for video artist Abby Williams it occupies a particularly libidinal space, one of playful if sometimes compulsive identification and desire. In YES (2002) , Williams operates the camera and hence is never seen, turning the viewer into the protagonist/voyeur. The camera enters a subway car and begins to scan the riders. As we watched the video the word “yes” begins to appear on some men, the word “no” on others, and the word “maybe” on still others. Apparently, Williams is marking men for their potential as sexual partners. When a man she is drawn to is with another woman, an X appears over the woman's body: Williams is symbolically getting rid of the competition. The subway is a public place in which strangers often stand close to each other and have a kind of tacit permission to look. Passengers are expected to respect each other's personal space and not to stare, but as a train lurches to a sudden stop, for example, bodies may come in contact. The song that Williams uses for the soundtrack for YES, “I want you” you is by Revlon 9, a Swedish Trio with a female vocalist, it perfectly encapsulates the issue raised: sung with a breathy, insistent urgency, the lyrics have a boy crazy aspect, but also remind us that the need for human connection is constant, as in the plaintiff refrain, “I want you / I need you / I want you to / need me too.“ By placing us in the position of the erotically/neurotically driven protagonist, Williams implicates us in the game/drama that she enacts. She has written, “I traced the line between the ecstasy and constraint of my consumption as an attempt to break down the fuzzy binarim of our Yes-No culture.”
–Bob Nickas, Greater New York catalog 2005
