Lorna Williams "Brown Baby"
DODGEgallery
This event has ended.
DODGEgallery presents “brown baby”, an exhibition of new work by Lorna Williams. This is Williamsʼ first solo exhibition at DODGEgallery and her New York debut.
Driven by materiality, Williams creates mixed media collages, paintings, and sculptures, often fusing practices. Born and raised in New Orleans, Williamsʼ work reflects a deep seated influence of music and performance, leading her to focus on the body as her tool and subject. Through an often laborious physical process, Williams distills collected material and imagery into amorphous figurative compositions.
I am fascinated by the functions that all materials, whether human-made or natural, are subject to performing and am always searching for the possible relationships among them—always seeking to assemble, arrange and connect them in ways that speak to concepts that I am visually processing. I use color, texture, pattern and found materials the same way that musicians use instruments—conjuring sounds that then are arranged and composed to produce music.
Williamsʼ work is as much born from her childhood as it is storytelling of cultural heritage and an articulation of her inner being. Through the process of connecting gathered and personal histories through material, Williams creates a new mythology, potent with symbology that speaks of life and death, the past and the present.
Her work is comprised of detritus from her life, including paper, branches, beads, bones, shells, bottles, dreadlocks and other items collected over the course of travels, living, and circumstance. Williamsʼ materials unify into abstracted figures that focus and dissolve, define and morph. The more sculptural her works, the more varying perspectives comprise a whole. The visually nomadic nature of her work embodies her own state of continual transformation distilled in the autobiographical exhibition title, brown baby.
Lorna Williams received her BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2010. She studied at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts, School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia. In 2009, she attended the Norfolk Program at Yale University.
[Image: Lorna Williams "brown baby" (2011) installation view]
Media
Schedule
from September 01, 2011 to October 02, 2011
Opening Reception on 2011-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00