In what’s at all times such an fascinating place to showcase ones work with printmaking and works on paper, previous cowl artist Robin F. Williams is ready to open Evening Shift at Pace Prints this week.
The artist’s second solo exhibition with Tempo Prints, this new physique of labor adopts the compositional and narrative vocabulary of b-movie horror movies, which have turn into a central touchpoint within the artist’s work during the last a number of years. From vampire and slasher flicks to supernatural and psychological thrillers, these supply supplies function the worry, ache, and want of feminine protagonists, whereas leaning closely into repetitious style conventions, to ask the viewer right into a curated emotional panorama.
For Williams, these expressions of utmost emotion, generally feminized inside the horror style, turn into the means via which to look at common human experiences throughout gender like catharsis for grief, emotions of vulnerability, in addition to inside and exterior transformation.
Identified for his or her boundary pushing strategy to figurative portray, which makes use of graphic and illusionistic strategies alongside revolutionary mark-making, Williams delved into the technical and materials potential of printmaking when creating the works for this present. To enrich their fastidiously hand rendered topics, the artist took on a extra playful and improvisational strategy within the printshop – accumulating and layering imagery, whereas additionally introducing graphic components.
Monoprints like Break up, Pierced, and Risen exemplify this remixing of visible components by superimposing feminine portraits with acquainted horror-related motifs that recommend the interaction of inside feeling and exterior forces. The reoccurring visuals between these works create an implied dialogue that carries an uncanny undercurrent all through your entire exhibition.
Increasing the fabric dialogue between works, Williams additionally included the by-products of the printmaking course of – reusing discarded supplies and check prints to create their first collages. Works like Firestarter, Expulsion, and Unified Area discover the artist leaning into the immediacy of the method to create supernatural house inside these works that recommend an emotional realm past the confines of the physique.
Evening Shift presents the artist’s first collection of non-figurative items created with Tempo Prints: Tarot Blossoms. This collection of monoprints seize the moiré impact skilled when taking a photograph of a movie on a TV display, which is the place William’s works typically start. The distortions and aesthetic quirks of movie and pictures might be discovered all through the prints within the present, from the psychedelic swirls of the Tarot Blossoms to the shattered coloration planes of the Shutter, Shock, and Awe collection.
Complimenting the subject material of the present, Williams additionally riffs on the bodily ephemera related to horror films to compile the present’s storylines into what they’ve known as a type of fan fiction. The present’s eponymous work Evening Shift serves as an imagined advertising and marketing poster for the present, attractive guests to step into the gallery and into the artist’s bent, damaged, and thrilling cinematic world.
Accompanying the exhibition shall be a printed Evening Shift film poster that shall be free for guests to take whereas provides final.
