Christopher Williams Supplements, Models, Prototypes

Press Release

Opening reception: Friday, February 3rd, 6-8pm

It is with utmost excitement that Corbett vs. Dempsey presents Supplements, Models, Prototypes, an exhibition of work by Christopher Williams. This is the gallery’s first exhibition with the artist.

With a practice based in photography but extending beyond the medium to every aspect of artistic endeavor, Williams is one of the preeminent contemporary conceptual artists, known for his painstaking revelations of the edifices of the art world, from images to the walls they hang on. In exhibitions like The Production Line of Happiness, his 2014 show at the Art Institute of Chicago and MoMA, he challenged the institution to consider unorthodox and potentially uncomfortable ways of engaging with his work, hanging it lower than standard museum height, for instance, or dispersing the work in different spaces throughout the institution. Williams photographs are each as considered and self-reflexive as his installation techniques, every one of them a wealth of ideas packed in an impeccable image. In Supplements, Models, Prototypes, Williams will present his collage works, which have been an important part of his practice since the 1980s, but have been less widely seen, more so in Europe than on these shores. This is the first full exhibition of the collages in the United States. Each piece is structured according to the same principle: Williams extracts images from a set of historical photography magazines, commercial representations of a particular model of camera, which he cuts out and mounts on standard sized sheets of green paper. These are then framed and hung in a grid, providing a visual history of the evolution of a particular camera. A free standing image floats nearby to the grid, presenting a single image that might have been taken with said camera. Beautiful in their systematic unearthing of the apparatus of image making, these collage works have looked basically the same since Williams began making them, flouting the usual notion of artistic development. As a dialogue with the collages, several large scale poster works will occupy one of the gallery’s walls, shifting the scale and installation technique.