Vertigo
Art Omi, Ghent, NY, July 6, 2024 - October 2026
In their practice Kiyan Williams traces histories of subjugation and dispossession embedded in the landscape, architecture, and iconography of the American project. Vertigo brings together new and recent work in which the artist splits, cuts, twists, and tilts monumental forms, creating earthen ruins in states of entropy and decay. Vertigo (2024) expands the artist series appropriating neoclassical architecture. In the sculpture three neoclassical columns are reconfigured, collapsing the towering forms into a single composition. Within Greco-Roman orders, the columns symbolize an allegorical figure: the capital the head, the cylinder the body, the base the feet. Further, the column design and proportions embody idealized gendered forms: ionic columns represent the female figure, doric the male figure, and corinthian the young maiden. Williams mis/rearranges the orders: a corinthian head is combined with a doric base, the proportions of a doric column are used to make an ionic one, collapsing structures in which legacies of normative gender are embedded. Removed from their function as structural support, and refusing verticality, the sculpture tilts off-axis, finding balance by resting on each other for support, creating a new system out of the old one.
Ruins of Empire is a 1:1 replica of the Statue of Freedom, the 19th century neoclassical bronze created by Thomas Crawford and fabricated in part by Phillip Reid, an enslaved sculptor. Made of and embedded in earth, the sculpture transforms a monumental statue into an earthen relic, revealing the fissures and volatilities that undergird the symbolism of the original. In Williams’ recreation, the earthen sculpture sinks into the earth 15 degrees off-center. Wild plants grow abundantly around both pieces, with bees and bugs humming in the tall grass. By manipulating a historic statue, Ruins of Empire deconstructs an iconic symbol, subverts the conventions and materiality of monumentalism, and surfaces the diasporic histories that undergird neoclassical forms.
In Williams’s public art works the earth and weather are protagonists and collaborators. The sculptures morph and transform particle by particle in response to rain, heat, shifting atmospheric conditions, and gravity. The two works in Vertigo evoke an archeological site from a speculative future where monumental forms and structures of power are remade and reclaimed by an entanglement of fugitive plant, insect, animal, human, and non-human life. Set within the verdant hills of the Hudson Valley, Williams’ installation opens an art historical dialogue with Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire - Desolation, a seminal work depicting a civilization that falls to ruin.
