NYAB Event - John Williams “Halved and Quartered”

John Williams “Halved and Quartered”

Brennan & Griffin (Red Hook)

This event has ended.

Brennan & Griffin presents Halved and Quartered, John Williams’ seventh solo show with the gallery. The exhibition comprises an epic new eight-part painting and a selection of Williams’ most notable sculpture and installation works.

For nearly two decades, Los Angeles-based artist John Williams has established an evolving practice—which includes sculpture, painting, collage, photography, video, sound, installation, and performance—that reveals a porous exchange between media and aesthetic systems. At the center of this multi-disciplinary body of work is the artist’s refined attention to materiality, that of both physical and ephemeral forms. His ongoing series Record Projection (2008 - present), for example, deftly negotiate the immateriality of light, sound, and movement through carefully crafted structures; these small abstract assemblages are composed atop vinyl LPs, which Williams activates during his performances by spinning them on turntables and projecting light onto their surfaces. The result is a magic-lantern-like spectacle that plays with architectural space, refracted color, patterned shadow, and amplified noise.

From his Record Projection series, Williams developed a series of large abstract paintings that both refer to the formal impressions of his sculptural processes and are discrete, non-representational compositions. For this exhibition, the artist has produced an architecturally-scaled work composed of eight related canvases. As a whole, this giant painting occupies nearly the entire back wall of the gallery, producing a collision of harmonious and discordant moments. This painting contrasts with another wall-sized architectural intervention, Bell Tower (2005), which Williams will present here for the first time in ten years.

Originally installed in Los Angeles in 2005, Bell Tower takes as its foundation a built wall erected with a wedge-shaped opening that converges in a curve that echoes a bronze gong encased in the wall about the portal-like aperture. A gong tone periodically resounds throughout the space. As Williams explains, “Time is split in a similar way that space is split. The chiming of the bell is an event that happened or is about to happen, you are moving towards the event, then it rings and you are moving away from it. At some point this movement away from the event, remembering becomes anticipation, and then it happens again.”

Williams’ focus on sound as a malleable and present material was investigated early on in his significant 2003 sculpture Cry Radio, also included in this exhibition. Loosely based on a radio broadcast tower and examples of both public sculpture and minimal art, this large steel structure is formed out of the letters “C,” “R,” and “y.” The design refers to a basic human emotive as well as to the sound that the sculpture transmits from an antenna at its top; as a live broadcast system, the sculpture dispatches the sound of children crying and throwing tantrums, which Williams recorded in public retail spaces. “The recordings are played on a loop,” explains Williams, “and, when broadcast on a car radio, will interact with other radio signals. In L.A. I found a radio channel with a sporadically audible distant station and set the transmission there. The sound then became a collage of crying, songs, and advertisements and was completely unique to every listener in every location and at every time - it was alive in time and had no set form.” The work is meant to be encountered as both an object in the gallery space and as an auditory presence experienced while moving through urban space.

John Williams (b. 1975) lives and works in Los Angeles. He receive his Master of Fine Arts from California Institute of the Artis in 1999. Recent notable exhibitions include: Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles (2014), They Might Well Have Been Remnants of a Boat organized by The Calder Foundation, New York (2013), Teenage Hallucination at the Pompidou Center, Paris (2012), The Mass Ornament at Barbara Gladstone, New York (2010), and Record Projection at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2009).

Media

• Painting
• Sculpture

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