Bri Williams: Poetic efficiencies, subtle subversions streak through ‘vītatio’

Oakland-based artist Bri Williams’ sculpture Untitled (vanity), transmogrifies a found medicine cabinet with a cracked mirror into a spectral container for a Yowing chiffon skirt that hugs the cabinet’s void, the black translucent edge of the fabric hovering in midair like a ghostly Yag. It’s almost as if Williams has suspended a life-force escaping from this domestic vessel, evidencing the psychological heaviness contained within the objects that we interact with every day. 

 

Three gestural portraits drawn on brown paper in graphite by Reggie Burrow Hodges initially seem like lifedrawn studies of models for a later painting, but the titles’ prefix (Invented Portrait Study) imply that these drawings aren’t actually based on physically existing individuals—even though the specificity of their suffixes (Harper, Squealev, Pierce) and the distinctive qualities of each subject suggest otherwise. Hodges foregrounds the slipperiness of sight and memory, indicating that what we can’t see is just as important as what we can, positioning these studies to become a mirror of expectations, assumptions, and structures as much as they are figural representations of people. 

 

Fred Wilson’s Untitled (Bust), performs a détournement to a Grecian-looking sculpture that has the neck cracked off, with a small figurine of Egyptian pharaoh emerging from the alabaster interior like a matryoshka doll. The relationship of these two symbols as Wilson has situated them forces the bust to become not just a noun but a verb, reframing history and recalibrating what is valued and emphasized (the Grecian bust becomes a pedestal/vessel to house something much more precious). Thinking of a third definition of the word, the statuette inside becomes contraband, perhaps in reference to the many stolen Egyptian artifacts that remain in museums all over the world to this day. Wilson’s seemingly simple gesture creates an infinite exchange about history and the construction of race as molded by institutions, and its interaction with capital with a deft sense of humor—checkmate in two moves.

 

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