Kyle Williams

Artist Statement

There is a specific kind of presence that I experience only with objects on screen. Objects that have a strangeness or an uncanny quality. One can point to it in the films of Buster Keaton or Jacques Tati where objects and bodies are nudged out of the logic of the world. They behave like something slightly different from themselves in a way that is both miraculous and utterly deadpan, and they speak to an ineffable relationship people have to the things around them.

My work is a series of experiments about objects and screen presence. It is a wide-ranging practice that includes collecting and building props, constructing optical devices and mechanical apparatuses, making drawings, and shooting video. It’s embedded in the history of painting, cinema, and our most contemporary image-making technologies. The results of these experiments range from elaborate investigations of optical media and elegant, deadpan constructions, to hamfisted iPhone videos and charcoal drawings of still lifes.

In my recent work, a structural exploration of screen technology – of the cameras, projectors, interfaces and algorithms – has provided a framework for questions about how images are made, the objects that make them, and the possibilities of an object transformed to image. I want the work to complicate the proximity of virtual and physical objects, of screen time and real time, and also of language and presence. My pacing is slow, my humor flat, and my scenes unpopulated. Ultimately, I would like the work to give viewers time with objects that have been nudged out of their place in the world, as a kind of cinematic reimaging of the distance that exists between us and our things.

CV