Kandis Williams: A Surface

American artist Kandis Williams works across collage, sculpture, film, performance, writing, pedagogy and publishing. Her multidisciplinary practice leverages the experience of the body alongside personal and communal histories to explore and challenge notions of race, nationalism, authority and eroticism, among other subjects. Her meticulously compiled collages are densely layered, both in structure—through repetition of forms and figures—and in content, with an emphasis on politically loaded and libidinal images. Often inspired by history painting, these works are composed of images culled from magazines and archival texts, placed into an unsettling interplay. Williams considers these collages as a disintegration of photographic value into layered schematics. Similarly, Williams’ performance practice explores coded social choreographies, emphasizing structural and systemic violence. In her performances, disembodied segments of text become collages, making up scripts for her performer