KANDIS WILLIAMS: INNER STATES

ST. CHARLES PROJECTS @ 2701 CHARLES ST.

Opening June 3rd 5-8 pm 2016

St. Charles is excited to host Inner States, a solo exhibition by Kandis Williams, a native of Baltimore who has spent the past eight years in Berlin. Inner States is a series of Xerox collages drawn into with construction materials.

Kandis’ manipulation of images within an architectural scaffold merges hierarchies of subject and surface speaking to how a Freudian analytic might be messily constructed around a black subject.  

Place and person are the central narrative of the work. The process of black and white toner degrading in exhaustion produces a slipstream collage of family photos from fin de siecle Vienna and 1980's Baltimore. Memory and history are latticed through each other.

A goal of this body of work is to discuss how psychoanalytics act as a tool for examining subjectivity, that forces interiority and exteriority. The images of Freud's children, wife, and female disciples in this work are also a conflation of the analytic praxis and the distance between the drives of the analyst and the analysis itself.

Does theorizing deviance implicate the theorist, can this theorization travel outside of the author's familial construct, social milleu? Divisions that the Freud family experienced are used to dissect a reading of the artist’s family. The series is a practice in seeing a personal past through a dominant cultural framework by working backwards into the context of a cartographer of illness.

Showing this work in Baltimore will answer a question of audience for the artist herself. Her family lives in Baltimore, and have lived in Trinidad and Tobago.