Present Future
Kandis Williams
Critical text
Kandis Williams (b. 1985, Baltimore) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice encompasses collage, performance, writing, publishing, and curation. Central to her work is an examination of the body as it is forced into the sphere of semiotics. In both her collage work and her choreographed performances, Williams addresses and unfounds the socially coded associations by which the human body becomes a signifier. Gesture is demonstrated to be a site of the spectator’s immediate perversion and projection, placing choreographic traditions alongside movements recognizable from imagery spanning American history. On the occasion of Present Future Kandis Williams will be presenting ‘Eurydice’, an ongoing series of performances, collages, sculptures, and videos, which refer to the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, wherein Eurydice is consigned permanently to the realm of the undead because Orpheus is unable to look away from her. Performer Josh Johnson enacts this moment of tragic ‘severance’, revealing and disrupting a cultural feedback loop of fetishization and erasure.
The artist’s voice
In my work I’m in thought about the tools of perception and the dominance of certain tools in composing images. Racism is a tool of perception. I think we’re seeing the deconstruction of the dominance of that perceptual tool.
Artworks
Videos
Davida Nemeroff presenting Kandis Williams
Enjoy a video presentation of the work of Kandis Williams (artist) by Davida Nemeroff (gallerist)
Meet Kandis Williams
Kandis Williams talks about her independent press, Cassandra Press, which is a very important part of her practice