Please join us online for the first Twilight Hour talk of 2021 with New York-based artist Rachel Eulena Williams on Tuesday, January 19th at 1:00 pm (PST).

Rachel Eulena Williams (b. 1991, Miami, Florida, USA) earned her B.F.A. from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York in 2013. Her work has been exhibited internationally at Loyal Gallery, Stockholm (2019), Ceysson & Bénétière, Sainte Etienne (2018), Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2018), Derek Eller Gallery, New York (2018), Cooper Cole, Toronto (2018), The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2017), Mass Gallery, Austin (2017), SomeTime Salon, San Francisco (2017), and Center Street, New York (2017). Williams has held the SIP Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York (2019), 68 Projects, Berlin (2018), and NY Studio Factory, Brooklyn (2014). Rachel Eulena Williams currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

Williams works at the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Her reconfigured canvases unbind painting from the stretcher, avoiding conventional support systems and imagining a myriad of spatial contortions. Some works in this exhibition take this to the extreme: sprawling across the walls resembling assemblages more than canvases. In others, Williams pulls these shapes back into the frame, creating sculptural works that push out of the two-dimensional plane. Williams’ vibrant use of colour represents a critique of, and liberation from, Western art history’s ‘othering’ of colour, and its categorization as unruly, foreign, and vulgar. The artist embraces those colours marginalized by the chromophobia of the West, which defined them as both dangerous and superficial. Williams’ distinctive works question these restrictions placed on colour and shape, as well as how virtuosity is defined.

Twilight Hour is a speaker series hosted by the Painting and Sculpture + Expanded Practices programs in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and organized by Elizabeth McIntosh and Emily Hermant.

Zoom link: https://ca01web.zoom.us/j/69356688614

Meeting ID: 693 5668 8614

Passcode: 308159