Lorna Williams (Visual Arts Alumni)
Lorna Williams: ‘brown baby’
Dodge Gallery
15 Rivington Street, Lower East Side
Through Oct. 2
This uneven but lively exhibition of assemblages by Lorna Williams (born 1987; graduated last year from the Maryland Institute College of Art) feeds a suspicion that many youngsters are turning for inspiration to that funky, organic decade of the 1970s, when the idiosyncratic aesthetics of artists like Joseph Cornell, Betye Saar and Eva Hesse were ascendant.
Like a rural outsider artist, Ms. Williams mixes gnarly branches, roots and tree trunks, plumbing hardware, patterned paper, beads, feathers, doll parts, bones and lots more natural and non-natural stuff into pantheistic poetry. The biggest and most impressive efforts resemble arboreal spirits come to life in a magical forest at the edge of a junkyard. One over eight feet tall, called “birth right,” has a peak-roofed wooden bird feeder for a head and is doing a stomping dance on twiggy legs and splayed feet. Another, “equiv.o.cal,” looks at first just like a 12-foot-long tree branch; look again and it becomes a reclining, spread-legged female figure in erotic ecstasy.
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Tree of Life: Q+A With Lorna Williams
by Carly Gaebe 09/07/11
Twenty-five-year-old Lorna Williams’s debut New York solo show of new work, “brown baby,” is autobiographical in extreme and mythologizing ways. A voyage through idiosyncratic sculptures, the depictions begin in utero, with C(ross)-Section, L. Williams, 1986, a cross-section of a tree hung as a relief, mounted with a collage of torn orange papers. An upside-down fetus is nestled in the wood. Another relief, crowning, depicts Williams’s birth with a ring of curly brown hairs and the top of an infant’s head covered in thorns pushing through the wood. For Williams, the thorns are her protection as she begins the struggle of launching an art career.
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