Christopher Williams
29 Apr - 21 Jun 2015
CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS
The Production Line of Happiness
29 April - 21 June 2015
A finger poised on a camera – its open back revealing the film roll and mechanism – sets the scene for this exhibition of photographs about photography. Somewhere between a film director, a picture editor and an art historian, American artist Christopher Williams (b.1956) investigates photography as the defining medium of modernism.
Williams’ exquisite prints reveal the unexpected beauty and cultural resonance of commercial, industrial and instructional photography. Often working with set designers, models and technicians, Williams’ technically precise pictures recall Cold War era imagery and 1960s advertising, as well as invoking histories of art, photography and cinema. His photographs are elements at play in a larger system including architecture, exhibition design, books, posters, videos, vitrines and signage that investigates the stage sets of the art world and the publicity structures on which they rely.
From his renowned 1989 studies of botanical specimens, Angola to Vietnam, to the hyper-real, colour saturated studies of kitchenware made in 2014, this first survey of Williams’ work in the UK immerses us in visually enthralling and politically resonant lines of enquiry.
The Production Line of Happiness
29 April - 21 June 2015
A finger poised on a camera – its open back revealing the film roll and mechanism – sets the scene for this exhibition of photographs about photography. Somewhere between a film director, a picture editor and an art historian, American artist Christopher Williams (b.1956) investigates photography as the defining medium of modernism.
Williams’ exquisite prints reveal the unexpected beauty and cultural resonance of commercial, industrial and instructional photography. Often working with set designers, models and technicians, Williams’ technically precise pictures recall Cold War era imagery and 1960s advertising, as well as invoking histories of art, photography and cinema. His photographs are elements at play in a larger system including architecture, exhibition design, books, posters, videos, vitrines and signage that investigates the stage sets of the art world and the publicity structures on which they rely.
From his renowned 1989 studies of botanical specimens, Angola to Vietnam, to the hyper-real, colour saturated studies of kitchenware made in 2014, this first survey of Williams’ work in the UK immerses us in visually enthralling and politically resonant lines of enquiry.