For the Positions sector of Art Basel Miami Beach 2021, Night Gallery is thrilled to present a solo exhibition by Kandis Williams, A Garden. One of contemporary art’s great voices of political and philosophical inquiry, Williams’ sculptures and time-based work combine elements of her practice to create an immersive, singular experience. 

In this presentation, Kandis Williams examines the historical movement of plant life in-dialogue with legacies of forced migration and diaspora. These sculptures incorporate images of laboring bodies in action throughout history. As images are layered and re-layered, a schema is revealed in the libidinal relations between labor and performance. Through the sculptures, Williams illuminates and critiques the taxonomic structures by which Black peoples are classified and presents the poetic sounds, artifacts, images, and visual phenomenon produced under oppression as both natural history and popular culture. Further, Williams exposes the enduring reverberations of racial colonization and articulates a metaphorical relation between the mechanisms of racialized subjection and the history of botanics. Taken as a whole, Williams’ sculptures make testament to the lasting effects of primitivism on how Black life is seen, felt, murdered, and celebrated.

Williams’ new time-based work “A Garden,” 2021 gives a visual language to the interconnections between bodily and aesthetic indexes, and the influence of the Bauhaus-era taxonomization of color on contemporary design and anti-Black racism. Drawing upon W.E.B. Du Bois’ infographics and data portraits as well as Josef Albers’ subsequent color studies, “A Garden” takes the form of a slideshow in which Williams expands upon her exploration of the gestures of the laboring body. Williams establishes three indexes of corporeal labor: the sexual body, the dancing body, and the working body. Images are layered upon color-aids, building into a timeline that delineates changes in physical action. Notably, “A Garden” is narrated by Bracha L. Ettinger, whose formulation of the I/Non-I adds an interpretative layer to the matrixial borderspace Williams is charting. Here, Ettinger’s thought acts as an interlocutor for the staging of Williams’ composition, and for the emergences of compassion, risk, and witnessing in relation to the trauma of the event or encounter.

Kandis Williams (b. 1985, Baltimore, Maryland) received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2009. She has presented solo exhibitions at 52 Walker, a David Zwirner exhibition space, New York, NY; Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA; Works on Paper, Vienna; and SADE, Los Angeles. She has participated in group exhibitions at several institutions, including the Hammer Museum and Huntington Libraries, Los Angeles; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Wignall Museum of Contemporary Art, Rancho Cucamonga, CA; Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Underground Museum, Los Angeles. Her work has recently been featured in the New York Times, Hyperallergic, Artforum, GQ Style, Frieze, W Magazine, LA Weekly, and Cultured, among others. Her work belongs in the permanent collections of the  Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore; Julia Stoschek Collection, Berlin; and the New Berlin Art Society, Berlin. She is the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Mohn Award, granted by the Hammer Museum in recognition of artistic excellence, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ 2021 Grants to Artists Award.

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