EXPECTATION (PLAIN SIGHT DC, EU National Institutes of Culture & the Austrian Cultural Forum), 2020-2023
The difference between being a body and having a body is that being a body is in direct conversation with one’s physical presence—to shift weight, to breath, to sense—and having a body implies that our bodies stand for some larger context in direct conversation with culture, sometimes becoming a symbolic political object. On a basic scale, COVID-19 called attention to the limitations of our physical bodies: to touch, to breath, to see. On a more complex level, it highlighted social inequity: the violence shown against black communities highlights that there is a difference existing in a body so steeped in politics.
Drawing inspiration from the illustrations in Fridolin Franse Frisiert by Michael Roher, and their ability to communicate the oneness of the individual and the multitude of experiences contained within simultaneously, this work centers thoughts about care through an accumulation of small intimate gestures. In this case, that gesture is a stitch and another stitch and another…emphasizing the seaming together of appliquéd, sewn, silver meaty pieces hung and displayed for visual consumption.
These bodies are abstracted, showing small visual resemblances to an orifice here and a protuberance there but never replicating a body exactly. In the abstraction, these gestures contemplate through hand sewing, stitch by stitch—the unfolding of the past years, what politics are steeped within so many of our bodies, an act that contemplates in its satire the ridiculousness of judging literal meat.
Blair Murphy from An Adventure in Being Catalogue (MOCA Arlington), 2024
"Stephanie J. Williams’ two installations in the exhibition further explore questions of empathy, identity, and the ways our experience of having a body is impossible to extricate from the world our bodies inhabit. In both Expectation and Gym Joy, Williams creates physical objects that act as stand-ins for the human body, exploring the ways that categories of race and sexuality shape and are shaped by our experiences of embodiment.
Williams distinguishes between being a body—including physical experiences of embodiment, like breathing—and having a body, which is shaped by the social and cultural context that makes the body a political object. The COVID-19 pandemic drove home the vulnerability of being a body but also the ways that having a body that fits certain externally constructed categories can subject an individual to structural violence and inequities.
Evoking muscles and organs and suspended like a butcher shop display, Expectation suggests the commodification of a living being. The bright colors and soft textures of the work move the piece in a more abstract direction, however. This distance between the violence of the commodified body and the abstraction of the work reflects a disjunction between how a person understands and experiences themselves, as a physical being, and how they are categorized by the social forces of racism and capitalism. The process of creating Expectation was an act of care, a process of laboring, stitch after stitch, and attending to the physical form of a body while considering, as Williams puts it, “what politics are steeped within so many of our bodies.” Gym Joy draws on the layered meanings of the seemingly simple tube sock, including its ability to, as the artist explains, “queer social conformity.” Tied to normative social activities like group sports, the sock’s ubiquity, uniformity, and association with the body made it ripe for reappropriation. In Gym Joy, a group of the socks takes on a life of their own, exerting a presence in the gallery that is both playful and subversive. They are gathered together on the floor, exuberantly twisting and coiling upwards, inverting the normal relationship between human feet and the floor."