SUE WILLIAMS
2020-11-30From her early works as feminist provocatrice, to her middle period as tongue-in-cheek expressionist and her more recent paintings that symphonize critiques of American power structures with formal and chromatic experimentation, Williams has attuned herself to the insidious and unavoidable truths that stick in the craw of our supposedly benevolent universe.
In 2020, the brutal reality of living in the waning days of American Empire has allowed Williams to consider how we might have arrived at this point. Her new paintings are suffused with images of colonial times: disembodied Pilgrim clogs, Tudor cabins, horses outfitted with blinders, the literal nuts & bolts that prefigured the industrial revolution, Betsy Ross as a dinosaur. The suggestion that America is founded on violence and manipulation, that the post-truth, post-Trump, post-COVID world is not an anomaly but a continuation of a status quo built over the past 400 years, doesn’t seem far-fetched. A painting titled “Land Of Profit and Coincidence” would resonate equally in 1620 or 2020.
Opposite – Pilgrims Progress
Exhibition runs through to January 30th, 2021
303 Gallery
555 W 21st Street
NY 10011
New York
