Videos: 1) Abbey Williams, Intermission, 2018. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Flash Art, and Artforum. Williams holds a BFA from the Cooper Union, an MFA from Bard College, and was a participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Solo exhibitions in New York include Foxy Production, Bellwether Gallery, Sargent’s Daughters, and in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Williams was a part of the 2005 Greater New York exhibition at MoMA PS1. Her work has been exhibited at TATE Britain, London, UK National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, Israel The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY. Williams’s redactions take us from a cinematic space to a cosmic space, a blackness that in taking over the screen becomes so all-encompassing in its encryption of information that the only place left to go is up and into the stars, a constellation that proposes a celestial afterlife of Black femmehood, held tenderly in its expansiveness.Ībbey Williams lives and works in New York City, where she was born and raised. Williams considers overture in its dual definition: mutually as a type of introduction and an orchestral precursor to a performance. This, alongside visual splicing and sonic remix, creates moments of disembodied atemporality and optical disconnection that, in their opacity, shift the possibilities of direct readership. Theorist Christina Sharpe’s Black redaction and Black annotation as ways of mediating viewership take on new shape and form via Williams’s application. The artist makes known her hand by applying the editorial strategy of redaction in the form of black stripes that appear intermittently across the screen, barring the legibility of text and images. Also interwoven are contemporary hip-hop recordings by Black female artists such as CupcakKe’s “Doggy Style” (2016), Princess Nokia’s “Tomboy” (2017), and Khia’s “My Neck, My Back” (2002). Williams continues to explore an oppositional gaze as an exercise in her Overture (2020), which splices together parts of the 1964 musical dramedy My Fair Lady that grapple with the politics of gender and class-a film reshaped from George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, drawing from Greek mythology. The artist challenges the audience to hold and make space for Ray in ways beyond a sight set solely to consume her budding celebrity within the moment the record was made, giving her a gentle spotlight, long past due. Thirty-three seconds into this rare track we hear Ray performing a moment of breakdown, a weeping that prompts the music to come to a halt and a voice “off-stage” (perhaps spoken by Ray herself, an internal monologue, made external) to call out: “Ada, pull yourself together, we have a record to do!” An intermission inside of an intermission, Williams in this pairing triggers the senses. The group’s success was short-lived, disbanding in 1965 since then the music and Ray’s legacy has been largely underrecognized, with Ray passing away in 2012. 2 on the charts in 1963, the same year JFK was assassinated. Ray herself was a member of the Bronx-based American girl-group the Jaynetts, known for their hit “Sally Go ’round the Roses” that reached No. Entwined with Ray’s vocals, Williams shows monochromatic tiles shifting on the screen, an eerily empty stage in changing light, viewed from above, Ada Ray just out of reach. In Intermission, Williams calls forth funk and soul singer Ada Ray through the haunting layering of Ray’s song “I No Longer Believe in Miracles” (1962).
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