Didier William
My paintings image the resultant network that is formed when myth, Afro-Caribbean history and personal narrative combine. The carved eyes in my paintings conscript the viewer into a flamboyant narrative made deliberately queer by refusing explicit sex and gender signifiers. In order to destabilize the performance of gender as a kind of cultural evidence of sex and sexuality my bodies are intentionally void of such indicators. Similarly, they slip out of easily racialized categories and instead insist on a circuit of active looking between them and the viewer. In a manner akin to science fiction viewers are forced to contend with a dissociated body; a body that is cloaked, patterned, adorned; perhaps even consumed with diversionary tactics.
Influenced by my upbringing in Miami, the places in my paintings are informed by the psychosocial spaces occupied by diaspora communities. My work has always been preoccupied with imagining unconventional bodies and specifically questioning black and queer identity formation. Materially I find no value in demarcating between printmaking, painting, collage and drawing as they combine, collide and accumulate into the surfaces of my objects. I draw on historical content, Haitian vodou symbolism, and personal narrative to inform not only my research but also my material choices. More recently boundaries and edges have become camouflaged within one another. I use “Camouflage” here as an umbrella term that refers to an alternative presence that both denies and reaffirms the physical body. In this way the body is omnipresent. Extended with multiplicity into the grounds they occupy. The acts of figurative distortion, collage/patterning, and ornamentation, synchronize to form a permeable membrane between the psychological body and it’s failed container (anatomy.) My surfaces - where the body is formed through cuts, stains, and the residue of historical narratives - become sites of convergence and collision, marking both the fragility and the persistence of black humanity.
Broken Skies: Inferno, 2019
3 Plate Copper Etching, 20” x 30”
Kisa N’ap fe ansamn, 2019
4 Plate Copper Etching, 20” x 30”
Anwo, 2020
3 Plate Copper Etching, 22” x30”
“Broken Skies: Ouve pot la pou yo” Open the door for them, 2019
Acrylic, Wood Carving, Oil, and Collage on Panel
“Broken Skies: Tè a mi” The Ground is Fertile
Acrylic, Wood Carving, Oil, and Collage on Panel
“Broken Skies: Nou poko fini” We aren’t done yet, 2019
Acrylic, Wood Carving, Oil, and Collage on Panel