Christopher Williams
November 18, 2004 - January 7, 2005
Main Gallery, John Hope Franklin Center
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Thursday, November 18, 2004
12:00 PM :: Lunch Discussion :: 240 Franklin Center
6:30 PM :: Opening Reception :: Main Gallery
One of the most intelligent and reflective artists working today, Christopher Williams trained at Cal Arts, receiving his BFA in 1979 and his MFA in 1981. He's had solo exhibitions in major galleries and museums in the US, Germany, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, and France and participated in major group shows in these countries along with Poland, the UK, the Netherlands, Canada, and Austria. In the US, Williams has shown at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Renaissance Society, The Museum of Modern Art, LA Museum of Contemporary Art, and Wexner Center (Ohio State University). He is represented by David Zwirner in New York.
Williams's photographic and filmic works draw heavily from German Neue Sachlichkeit photography but move beyond its indexical nature to a politics of "re-seeing," in which titles and objects (or objects and their referents) play out dialectical relationships, producing often startling new ways of seeing what has been seen before. His series "Angola to Vietnam" places together photographs of the flowers of glass from the Harvard Botanical Museum with titles drawn from State Departments lists of countries known for substantial human rights abuses. Or, as in this show, the images of the Grande Dixence dam, a dam featured in Godard's 1954 and first film, "Operation Beton." His "Department of Water, 1953-63 Dakar, Senegal May 16, 1996 (Nr. 1, 2 and 3)" place a German photographic tradition in a postcolonial environment, inviting us to refigure ideas of the western urban landscape to a concept of a globally-inflected cosmopolitan one.
Generally, Williams's work is a public thinking through of shared concerns of how we select to represent a global culturally-charged environment and certainly invites us into a continuing discussion of these issues.
The Franklin Center gratefully acknowledges Diego Cortez and the Salkie Family for their loan of the photographs in the show. We also thank the David Zwirner Gallery for its assistance.
For more information, contact Rob Sikorski, r.sikorski@duke.edu or 919.684.2867