http://www.mfoldgallery.com
Mountain Fold presents AMOK MANDALA, a collection of visual works by
Brooklyn-based artist and musician, Turner Williams. When Turner paints, he
paints crouched over a table, listening to old, scrubby mixed-tapes and fixating
on nothing but that surface some seven inches from his face. He is focused only
on the Absolute Detail. He might as well be in a hut in the South Pacific, or at
work in the den of some Uzbek embroiderer, working in gold thread on the tiniest
detailing. The rest of the canvas, covered in plastic, stays wholly out of view
and out of mind. This way, that Big Picture emerges only in the end, after the
neck cramps have subsided, and after Turner has finished weaving together his
glimpses, one onto another, into thick jungle of world-images. You look over the
canvas and see polaroid-visages, backyard nostalgia, living Nature, and strongly
anthropological icons nested and announcing themselves in
turn.
Williams traditionally worked smaller, on etchings of a tightly Audubon feel
and intricacy, until one day he was approached by a patron wondering whether he
could make "big" paintings. So indeed "I made big paintings," Turner tells us,
"only with the same variety of scales, and the same adamant attention to
detail." Williams is interested in a final composition that looks as though
it's crowded with sounds; with primate stirrings and street hubbub; a
mixed-taped of noises that might be garnered from a year on seven continents and
somehow laid together onto a common, flat plane. You easily imagine these
paintings as the long-lost movie posters for Moby Dick or Mondo Cane, with all
the accompanying blood and grace. Or maybe, even, a movie poster for your cool
uncle's Super-8 collection that never emerged from the attic on holidays because
his wife thought it might upset the kids. These paintings are, in many ways,
ethnographic reels that bring together the Non-Western and the Spaghetti Western
into a single, layered world portrait. A combined collection of both the
etched and the painted, AMOK MANDALA is a standing invitation for the public to
become as lost in the labor, and caught in the thicket, as the painter so often
is
himself.