Curated by Executive Care*
Elastic Synapse is multidisciplinary artist Tyler Cala Williams’ first solo exhibition, as well as their first body of oil paintings. Drawing from personal memory and diasporic visual culture, Williams’ practice examines what is lost, mutated, and newly formed as images move across mediums. Consisting of oil paintings and mounted prints, this exhibition marks a shift in Williams’ previous digital practice that focused on disrupting Western European surrealist works by inserting themselves or their friends as twisted thoughts into the composition. This work is more personal.
Through pixelation, moiré patterning, perspectival distortion, hyperreal rendering, and chromatic disruption, Williams destabilizes fixed notions of representation and interrogates how Black visuality circulates within contemporary image economies. By embracing slippage and material transformation, their work reanimates the Black imagination as a space of fugitivity, care, and alternative possibility.
Williams culls images in a process that feels like spiritual image mining. While gathering images, they give themself and the images permission to gravitate and speak to one another freely. Bits of photos off the internet are digitally rendered with bits of memes, photos from their own camera roll, and/or parts of magazine editorials to then be devotionally rendered into meticulous oil paintings on canvas, honoring the connection that every visual element sparked in Williams’ brain and body. Like intrusive thoughts nestled in brain corners finally given a little room to roam and play with fractal memories.
*Executive Care is a curatorial agency at the service of trans and queer artists of color from performance and nightlife communities founded by writer, curator, and poet, Isis Awad in 2020.
