Justin Williams

COMA is pleased to present a solo exhibition, titled Grass Like Paper Cuts, by Santa Fe-based artist Justin Williams (b. 1984), on view 1 September – 7 October in the Chippendale gallery. This is the artist’s third solo presentation with COMA.

Being in one place, seemingly more than another, comes across as irrelevant to Justin Williams at this stage. Place is simply a vessel and being is essentially an inevitability. This type of painting is about people. Inhabitants, travellers, passers-by and passers-through – they matter. Where they came from, and what year it may be, coalesce and imbue any location, any place, with life. History here is imperative, and new sites for new narratives spring up wherever tales of existence are told.

Grass Like Paper Cuts takes Williams previous forays into loosely anthropological art-making (cults and cast-aside communities based in North America prior to 1984, the denizens and tradespeople situated in Alexandria, Egypt, during the 1930’s, and the artist’s own familial and social history), and draws out distinctive moments of importance. At face value this is a gumbo of happenings and yet the connections each painting has to either another in the show, or an artwork from a previous body of work, slowly reveal themselves.

Through an empathetic and deeply emotional style of painting, Williams grants the viewer the space to find a likeness, a sense of nostalgia or something of note that slows down how one considers these figures and proposes real contemplation. Stories carried from person to person fill the canvases in a cross continental and historically ambiguous medley that begs for one to find themselves or their own history within the work. The figures vary in sex, height, colour and status, and yet they always interact. How you look becomes quickly peripheral and this in itself is both a commentary on social interaction as well as a response to a critique of contemporary figurative painting.

Regarding the idea of outsider culture, even I felt a certain way in Australia, a distance. I feel this in America. I feel this when thinking about my family history. But these places, these people – their stories and their history is something that becomes a part of you, something new.

Justin Williams

Proposed cultural amalgams are rooted in realism while allowing for small moments of nonsensical unions. Usually a crossover of time periods, or figures from unconnected landscapes, that would never have had the opportunity to meet. This is an artist’s response to animosity or friction between communities and a simple and effective way to first nullify and then propose an alternative, this alternative generally being a communion.

In Grass Like Paper Cuts a stillness, calmness and quietness is brought to the fore. Williams figures desire peace through equitable and enriching social interaction, and they welcome the world.