Angharad Williams: Picture The Others, Mostyn Gallery
Commissioned for Art Monthly, No. 455, April 2022
Early on in Ben Wheatley’s Pandemic-set occult horror In The
Earth (2021), two of the film’s central characters ponder the impacts of an
unnamed lockdown-triggering virus: “Things will get back to normal quicker than
you think; everyone will forget what happened,” one suggests. Her colleague, on
the other hand, isn’t so sure: “No. I don’t think anyone will forget.”
Nothing has changed, but everything has; things previously considered ‘normal’: objects, interactions (with both strangers and friends), the quotidian day-to-day, have become unusual – surreal even.
And it sems to me that the exchange above illustrates two poles of opinion – and responses – to our real-world brush with societal weirding in a post- (and yet not post-) Covid world. There are those who seem to have picked up where their lives left off before anyone had ever heard of coronavirus, eager to shop, socialise, get back to the office and what have you; some, meanwhile, are finding the adjustment less smooth, discovering built up centres of population to be stranger, more intimidating and less familiar with each visit.
Current Mostyn Gallery exhibition, Picture The Others, sees artist and writer Angharad Williams’ (in her first institutional show) in the latter camp. Although not explicitly addressing the effects and ongoing fallout of the last two years, the exhibition can’t help but be read in such terms. As we are reminded by the exhibition guide: “The world has ceased to present itself in the old terms.” Certainly, filtered through my own very recent (and belated) falling foul of Covid, Picture The Others reads as a quiet engagement with, and contemplation of the effects that this global happening has wrought on our subjective relationship to the outside world – and each other.
Across film, painting, sculpture and installation (all made in 2022), the exhibition is “an introspective search and subsequently a process of connecting to the outside.” Further, it asks ‘what do we do now that “the other” means practically everyone else?’ The first works encountered, The Security Dilemma II are not by Williams, but their inclusion, setting an ambivalent tone, is apt. The trio of Rhia Davenport’s corn dollies – in See No Evil Hear No Evil Speak No Evil poses – mirror now commonplace thoughts and fears about crossing the threshold of the front door into the outside world.
In the next space, the weird is turned up a few notches still, with lots to unpick. The Prism of Your Life sees a pair of reclaimed telegraph poles, strung between which is a pulley-operated clothesline. It has a non-identical twin in the exhibition’s final room, fixed to which is what looks like the outline of a window frame – firmly putting us in Rear Window territory. One has to wonder: are we on the outside looking in, or vice-versa? Relating to the law, relating to nature is a vermillion stained 1969 Prince of Wales investiture chair procured from eBay. Bearing the legend Ich Dien, from the German and meaning ‘I serve’, it asks pertinent questions of power relations. And juxtaposed with those scruffy telegraph poles, it cannot help but seem somewhat incongruous; not unlike today’s Royal Family themselves.
Suitably named 4k video work Joe Public finds the artist out and about, in the act of refamiliarizing herself with the world outside the window. Variously we see Williams at a car-boot sale, eating a packed-lunch, popping to the shops, and learning to shoot. All relatively mundane acts rendered less so by circumstance, in which we sometimes must dare ourselves simply to partake.
In two of the exhibition’s four spaces, you will find acrylic heat signature style paintings sharing the title The Dents. One of which, subtitled Predator and Pray [sic], features a small rodent; nearby, ominously, an uncoiled snake looms. As with other works in this thought-provoking and often gnomic exhibition, we are presented with a dichotomy. Just who might be cast as predator in this scenario? Who is on the other side of the equation? And, ultimately, can we – should we – take that which is shown to us at face value?
In a post-truth context, there are, increasingly, many different scenarios for which such questions seem increasingly relevant. Turning once more to the accompanying text: “We are presented with cleverly orchestrated and excessively violent political fiction under the guise of all kinds of different but very real wars...” Whether these be wars of culture or, as Vladimir Putin would have us believe, of the ‘special military operation’ variety.
Williams’ exhibition proposes that we, rather than swallow whole black and white interpretations of the world (for such narratives should be viewed with suspicion), exercise a greater degree of circumspection in our engagements with it, while extending consideration for how we picture those so-called ‘others’.
Picture the Others (19 February - 12 June 2022), Mostyn Gallery, Wales
Nothing has changed, but everything has; things previously considered ‘normal’: objects, interactions (with both strangers and friends), the quotidian day-to-day, have become unusual – surreal even.
And it sems to me that the exchange above illustrates two poles of opinion – and responses – to our real-world brush with societal weirding in a post- (and yet not post-) Covid world. There are those who seem to have picked up where their lives left off before anyone had ever heard of coronavirus, eager to shop, socialise, get back to the office and what have you; some, meanwhile, are finding the adjustment less smooth, discovering built up centres of population to be stranger, more intimidating and less familiar with each visit.
Current Mostyn Gallery exhibition, Picture The Others, sees artist and writer Angharad Williams’ (in her first institutional show) in the latter camp. Although not explicitly addressing the effects and ongoing fallout of the last two years, the exhibition can’t help but be read in such terms. As we are reminded by the exhibition guide: “The world has ceased to present itself in the old terms.” Certainly, filtered through my own very recent (and belated) falling foul of Covid, Picture The Others reads as a quiet engagement with, and contemplation of the effects that this global happening has wrought on our subjective relationship to the outside world – and each other.
Across film, painting, sculpture and installation (all made in 2022), the exhibition is “an introspective search and subsequently a process of connecting to the outside.” Further, it asks ‘what do we do now that “the other” means practically everyone else?’ The first works encountered, The Security Dilemma II are not by Williams, but their inclusion, setting an ambivalent tone, is apt. The trio of Rhia Davenport’s corn dollies – in See No Evil Hear No Evil Speak No Evil poses – mirror now commonplace thoughts and fears about crossing the threshold of the front door into the outside world.
In the next space, the weird is turned up a few notches still, with lots to unpick. The Prism of Your Life sees a pair of reclaimed telegraph poles, strung between which is a pulley-operated clothesline. It has a non-identical twin in the exhibition’s final room, fixed to which is what looks like the outline of a window frame – firmly putting us in Rear Window territory. One has to wonder: are we on the outside looking in, or vice-versa? Relating to the law, relating to nature is a vermillion stained 1969 Prince of Wales investiture chair procured from eBay. Bearing the legend Ich Dien, from the German and meaning ‘I serve’, it asks pertinent questions of power relations. And juxtaposed with those scruffy telegraph poles, it cannot help but seem somewhat incongruous; not unlike today’s Royal Family themselves.
Suitably named 4k video work Joe Public finds the artist out and about, in the act of refamiliarizing herself with the world outside the window. Variously we see Williams at a car-boot sale, eating a packed-lunch, popping to the shops, and learning to shoot. All relatively mundane acts rendered less so by circumstance, in which we sometimes must dare ourselves simply to partake.
In two of the exhibition’s four spaces, you will find acrylic heat signature style paintings sharing the title The Dents. One of which, subtitled Predator and Pray [sic], features a small rodent; nearby, ominously, an uncoiled snake looms. As with other works in this thought-provoking and often gnomic exhibition, we are presented with a dichotomy. Just who might be cast as predator in this scenario? Who is on the other side of the equation? And, ultimately, can we – should we – take that which is shown to us at face value?
In a post-truth context, there are, increasingly, many different scenarios for which such questions seem increasingly relevant. Turning once more to the accompanying text: “We are presented with cleverly orchestrated and excessively violent political fiction under the guise of all kinds of different but very real wars...” Whether these be wars of culture or, as Vladimir Putin would have us believe, of the ‘special military operation’ variety.
Williams’ exhibition proposes that we, rather than swallow whole black and white interpretations of the world (for such narratives should be viewed with suspicion), exercise a greater degree of circumspection in our engagements with it, while extending consideration for how we picture those so-called ‘others’.
Picture the Others (19 February - 12 June 2022), Mostyn Gallery, Wales