EVAN D. WILLIAMS
// Sugar hill, New york //
Evan D. Williams investigates the quandaries of the numinous and carnal self in a range of documental forms. His other unique artist's books are OR / WE (2018, Brooklyn Art Library), Do the Needful (2019, SVA Library), and Not All the Leopards Are Metaphors (forthcoming c. 2023). He also edited and published the international art and poetry anthology Deliver Me (2016), collaborated with poet Jose Perez Beduya on the photo-chapbook Panoramas (Lagos: Praxis, 2019), and contributed image-and-text pieces to various monographs and journals including Ficciones Typografika 1642 and The MacGuffin. Williams's unbound work has been included in over twenty group exhibitions and accessioned into several public collections including UT Austin, Jundt Art Museum, Hambis Printmaking Museum/Μουσείο Χαρακτικής Χαμπή, Museum of Witchcraft, and Order of the Holy Cross. He resides in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains with his wife and cats.
View more of Evan’s work at postpostmodern.ist
About Everything Material:
This unique artist’s book was produced using the salted paper process—the first form of paper-based negative-to-positive photography as devised by Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830s. Developed using salt mined under a glacial lake near the artist’s home, these images document his visits to various active and abandoned industrial sites across North America, Europe, and Africa. The series is prefaced by a prose poem that quotes liberally from Jack Kerouac, Cody-Rose Clevidence, and the Monsanto Company. The volume is held together with kaolin-coated paper covers and hand-stitched binding that allows each page to lie completely flat. Produced in collaboration with Heather Lathrop of HCL Gallery, Kernersville, North Carolina, and Stephan Petrella, Brooktondale, New York, this project was completed in 2020 during a residency sponsored by Overland Artworks at Sugar Hill, New York.
About the artist's Overland Artworks residency:
“After many months of being more or less housebound during the COVID-19 pandemic, taking just two days to experience a new place that is just twenty miles from home felt expansive, invigorating, and totally singular. Right after, it felt like I had returned from two weeks in a luxe Swiss chalet. Instead, I had driven into a state forest one county over and hiked a short distance into a clearing that held a decommissioned fire tower and a ranger cabin fitted with a little porch and a table and chair. I settled in and made that my studio. I was able to focus on the project for long stretches, though I also took long breaks to explore my surroundings. I came upon a small twinned cascade named Templar Falls and, not far upstream, a small cemetery overtaken by trees. Toward evening on my second day, the old fire tower, though fenced off, proved irresistible, and I climbed its helical stairs to an elevation of nearly twenty-two hundred feet and took in fifteen-mile views east and west. Having loomed over my provisional studio, the tower and its decades of critical service ended up asserting itself quite prominently in the book’s preface, which was intended to address and evoke the different sites depicted in the salt prints, visited months and years earlier. Thus, unexpectedly, the project became both a memory exercise and a record of its own rendering.” –E.D.W.