Defamiliarizing Myths

MARGARET KROSS, Flash Art , April 26, 2023
Bri Williams’s work drifts between feeling and intellect, eroding the distinction between the two into an embodied knowing and experience of a world governed by belief systems that are now bringing about its demise. Antique furniture fragments, obscure objects of spiritual or personal significance, and preserved detritus unfurl and meld within tactile encasements, forming installations and assemblages that open onto the artist’s inner world. Borrowing from Christian iconography, Americana, and other mythologies underlying collective consciousness, the resulting psychic space of her work is embedded with intimate memories and familial connections alongside wider, repeating histories of oppression and violence. As Williams’s vocabulary defamiliarizes her abstract symbols in gelatinous shards of resin and soap molds, scratched and scraped surfaces, burned wood, and occasionally taxidermy, she undresses the pretense of certainty in narratives of the United States — religious and political — that cloak insidious hierarchies based on ideas of bodily and spiritual purity.
 
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