Kandis Williams: A Surface

Introduction and text by Taylor Jasper. Text by Cheryl I. Harris, Denise Ryner, Mireille Miller Young, Mlondolozi Zondi.

American artist Kandis Williams works across collage, sculpture, film, performance, writing, pedagogy and publishing. Her multidisciplinary practice leverages the experience of the body alongside personal and communal histories to explore and challenge notions of race, nationalism, authority and eroticism, among other subjects. Her meticulously compiled collages are densely layered, both in structure—through repetition of forms and figures—and in content, with an emphasis on politically loaded and libidinal images. Often inspired by history painting, these works are composed of images culled from magazines and archival texts, placed into an unsettling interplay. Williams considers these collages as a disintegration of photographic value into layered schematics. 

Similarly, Williams’ performance practice explores coded social choreographies, emphasizing structural and systemic violence. In her performances, disembodied segments of text become collages, making up scripts for her performers. Through this process she proposes what she calls experimental pedagogy, a "consumption of academic texts that have a non-discursive output, an affective output that mythifies—weaving what kinds of knowledge are immediately relatable to an individual with the creation of a paradigm of thought."
A Surface is Williams’ first museum survey, offering visitors an in-depth experience of her vision and practice. The exhibition features both important and lesser-known works from the past decade of her career.

Kandis Williams was born in 1985 in Baltimore, Maryland. She studied at the Cooper Union School of Art. In 2016 she cofounded Cassandra Press, a publishing and educational platform that produces and distributes Black scholarship. She is currently a visiting faculty member at California Institute of the Arts.