NYAB Event - Turner Williams Jr. "Amok Mandala"

Turner Williams Jr. "Amok Mandala"

Mountain Fold Gallery

This event has ended.

Mountain Fold presents AMOK MANDALA, a collection of visual works by Brooklyn-based artist and musician, Turner Williams. When Turner paints, he paints crouched over a table, listening to old, scrubby mixed-tapes and fixating on nothing but that surface some seven inches from his face. He is focused only on the Absolute Detail. He might as well be in a hut in the South Pacific, or at work in
the den of some Uzbek embroiderer, working in gold thread on the tiniest detailing. The rest of the canvas, covered in plastic, stays wholly out of view and out of mind. This way, that Big Picture emerges only in the end, after the neck cramps have subsided, and after Turner has finished weaving together his glimpses, one onto another, into thick jungle of world-images. You look over the canvas and see polaroid-visages, backyard nostalgia, living Nature, and strongly anthropological icons nested and announcing themselves in turn.

Williams traditionally worked smaller, on etchings of a tightly Audubon feel and intricacy, until one day he was approached by a patron wondering whether he could make "big" paintings. So indeed "I made big paintings," Turner tells us, "only with the same variety of scales, and the same adamant attention to detail." Williams is interested in a final composition that looks as though it’s crowded with sounds; with primate stirrings and street hubbub; a mixed-taped of noises that might be garnered from a year on seven continents and somehow laid together onto a common, flat plane. You easily imagine these paintings as the long-lost movie posters for Moby Dick or Mondo Cane, with all the accompanying blood and grace. Or maybe, even, a movie poster for your cool uncle’s Super-8 collection that never emerged from the attic on holidays because his wife thought it might upset the kids. These paintings are, in many ways, ethnographic reels that bring together the Non-Western and the Spaghetti Western into a single, layered world portrait. A combined collection of both the etched and the painted, AMOK MANDALA is a standing invitation for the public to
become as lost in the labor, and caught in the thicket, as the painter so often is himself.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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