JENNIFER WILLIAMS: DEconstructing new york

october 28 - December 8, 2023
PRESS RELEASE I IMAGES

“No matter how high it soars, New York is a pedestrian city at heart. Millions of feet pound its pavement daily, funneling bodies through a street grid of harsh angles. Each block is a fleeting assemblage of time, technology, and politics, hurtling through history, embodying the fragmentary and often outrageous nature of urban flux.” - Jennifer Williams

Jennifer Williams: Deconstructing New York, on view from October 28 through December 8, 2023, at Robert Mann Gallery, will include both large and small scale multi-layered photographic constructions that transform neighborhoods into immersive representations of urban change.

Williams’ fourth solo exhibition with the gallery includes a large-scale unique collage spanning a full wall, with buildings jutting in every direction, depicting Hudson Yard’s startling transformation from industrial remnant to towering megaproject. In addition, twenty small relief constructions mounted on wood panels explore Midtown's dense, museum-like inventory of stone and glass skyscraper edifices. Also on view will be Williams’ new series, The Decorated Shed: East Village and Lower East Side, which explores “Streeteries,” the structures that took over the city streets during the pandemic and might be here to stay. The images isolate the structures in space calling attention to their unique shapes, colors, and decoration, focusing on one of the most dramatic changes to New York’s streets in recent years.

Williams’ photography style chronicles a pedestrian-eye view of New York City. Her merged, interpretive shapes reflect a transformation of experiences into memories, and then into visual representations. In her unique relief constructions, Williams prints the same image over and over, cutting and layering to create dimension within two-dimensional photographs. The result is a collection of detailed and colorful renderings which call our attention to the idiosyncrasies in architecture spanning past decades to recent years. By reinstating the dimensionality of the real world into photographs, Williams brings the buildings closer to us, emphasizing the inconceivable distance between pedestrian and towering architecture.

Jennifer Williams received her MFA from Goldsmiths College in London and her BFA from Cooper Union in New York, where she currently teaches. Her work has been widely exhibited throughout the country including the Queens Museum, The Akron Art Museum, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Honors include the 2018-2019 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Queens Council for the Arts grants, A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship and the NARS Foundation International Artist Residency. Her work has been featured in publications including The New Yorker, Excerpt Magazine, Title Magazine, Photography Quarterly, and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. She lives and works in New York City.

Please contact the gallery to arrange a viewing in person or view the exhibition online beginning October 28, 2023. For additional information and press materials, please contact the gallery at mail@robertmann.com