Sandy Williams IV

My work right now is dealing with a sense of inertia. I am interested in the way time can be passed down, transformed, and gathered inside of us, as well as in the things around us, through a propensity towards rest, also called history. I started making these Time Travel paintings as a way to capture the time I spent making an artwork. For these, I paint a grid or template, and then spend a specific amount of time sewing in the spaces I’ve created. The result is then an object that formally presents the time and effort that went into its making; an aesthetic record of my activity. As I work on them, I often think about all of the other things I could be doing with my time; and in particular, my distance away from my loved ones, as a way of traveling or projecting in place. Now that I am in quarantine, and it has become so much harder to visit my family, these works hold a particular resonance.

These Wax Monuments were first made as a proposal towards public sculpture. Traditionally, monuments are made to sit and collect a patina, as they withstand change in order to reflect a record of a people’s history. I am interested in visualizing change, and building monuments able to keep a record of activity. By circulating miniature wax versions of these monuments, people are given agency over these forms that are normally immobile. If these candles were made to be monumental, they would be within reach, adorned with wicks, and visitors would be invited to mold, burn, shape, look at, take from, or add to their forms, working together in a sort of public democracy.