BIOGRAPHY

Born in El Paso, Texas, Williams was raised in Sacramento, California. He completed his undergraduate at California College of the Arts, and graduate work at Claremont Graduate University. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries from California, Arizona, Illinois and Wisconsin; twice he was invited to exhibit his work at the Wisconsin Triennial.

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His work attempts to locate the relationship between the self, memory and temporality. He separates the black male body from specific environments to simultaneously question commodification and investigate life narratives, that question their value and positionality. 

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In an attempt to locate a relationship between the self, memory and temporality, this body of work employs the creation of a textural overlapping between representational iconography, and culturally explicit environments. Intentionally, indigenous visual metaphors have been assembled simultaneously to co-exist and resist, thus question our memories, our associations, and whether our bodies impede or conjoin self-knowledge. “It is a truism in psychological that the self and autobiographical memory are linked, yet still know surprising little about the nature of this relation. Recently theorizing on the role of narrative in human cognition suggests that it is through the construction of a life story that the self and memory are intertwined.” It is these lived stories that are investigated, and subsequently their contributions to our culturally shared perspectives. Concurrently, the work explores the tension between the isolation of self-constructed experiences and the forms of social interactions, which symbolize specific cultural frameworks that lead to narratives. “It is believed that narratives are culturally prescribed form of organizing events through canonicalized linguistic frameworks.” The ways in which individually and collectively we (de)construct life narratives are reflected both by the larger cultural frameworks, which establishes understanding of self and remembrance. Therefore the work embraces difference and juxtaposes the probability, that though culturally diverse autobiographical and biographical memory can be influenced by social interaction, and or social ostracism.

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Symbols of foregrounded idealized black males consigned to rhythmic positions disassociated from backgrounds heavy laden with their own associations and memories, calls into question our/their positionality and bespeaks occasions to tolerate/understand difference, as difference aids us to understand our own worldview. Only by listening to what is being said, can an individual become acutely aware of the conceptual shackles imposed by our self/societal identity and experiences. The work speaks the language of ambiguity, thus swaying from a punitive discourse. Knowledge does not arrive unmediated from the world, we are taught to follow the path of an epistemological praxis to make claim of our existence and subsequent survival. At its essence, this body of work conflates the societal constructed self, explores the temporality and narration of memories, in hopes of bridging myopic voices, thus arriving at the shores of sustainable awareness.