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The June Kelly Gallery is delighted to present
Philemona Williamson in her fourteenth exhibition with the gallery.
Recent Paintings reflects her longtime fascination with
visual intrigues from personal to universal narratives between
pubescent youth and the edginess of curiosity and uncertainty of
adolescent maturity. The exhibition will open at 166 Mercer
Street on April 18 and remain on view until June 4.
Williamson writes, “Recent Paintings is
an exploration of personal, professional, and social transition.
Anxiety, hope, curiosity, wonder, fear – the adolescent body becomes
an intense crucible of passion and mystery as it experiences the
unknown.”
Williamson’s gallery exhibitions have
highlighted her concentration on pubertal development and its
inevitable progression toward adulthood. She portrays the
accompanying emotional stages—ambiguity, hesitancy, and
vulnerability.
While implications of the border between
innocence and awareness, between pubescent youth and adolescent
maturity blur, Williamson is not hesitant in depicting adolescent
pensiveness, grappling with alienation and curiosity, amid
commonplace tempests in the growth to maturity.
Williamson writes, “This series of paintings
represents my continuing exploration of figures embodied in
interpreted environments, with psychological and metaphorical
consequences. These adolescents are informed and challenged by
the external events we encounter and try to make sense of them as
individuals and as a community. The paintings grapple with the
struggle and promise of maintaining relationships because these
bonds help you survive. They explore the otherness and
redefining of the self. The figures command the front of the
picture plane, demanding to be seen. Apparent vulnerability is
counterbalanced by the unexpected steadiness in taking an awkward
stance. The paintings reflect my transition experience, how
one’s life takes a turn and a twist, and what we must hold dear
amidst the tumult.”
In Williamson’s first gallery show in 1990,
Paula Giddings, essayist in the exhibition brochure, wrote “ …
profound, witty, surreal exploration of the human condition.
The World of Philemona Williamson is as fantasy-filled as a
tropical dream, as startling as a dreamer’s free-fall. It can
be as primal as a child’s fear… as sobering as the loss of
innocence.”
By the end of the decade, Williamson, an
accomplished colorist, fits her paintings with defiant
post-adolescent female figures who often appear to be in conflict,
psychologically and socially, with others on the canvas and with the
menacing environment in which they find themselves. Vulnerable
and awkward, yet aware and sensitive, searching for their identity.
Williamson uses “grand events”—floods, catastrophic storms, volcanic
disasters – as metaphors for psychological upheaval and tumult.
Art writer Cynthia Nadelman 2008 describes
Williamson’s new work as “more like poems than stories.” “By
design, they have elements whose genesis Williamson can trace to
current news or her own dreams, but in her hands, the implications
grow.” Nadelman continues, “As in dreams, there are the
recurring characteristics that make Williamson’s paintings very much
her own, yet also universal.
While Williamson’s work continues to teeter on
the edge of satire, tradition, and innovation, it is of note that
she derives some of her narratives from contemporary media
conundrums. Her depiction of blithe curiosity reflects less
concern with examining life stages between adolescence and adulthood
than with restless energy and uncertainty over social, cultural, and
political matters that she feels are logical and crucial.
Williamson says she is an observer of human behavior. While
she has long been fascinated with the innocence and wonder
of pubescent youth and its inevitable progression toward adulthood,
she finds this current culture yields a plethora of notions.
Her fabled energetic adolescent figures, raw with instinct, in the
throes and entanglement of play, in the pause of curiosity or on the
precipice of a happening while introducing figures that appear
older, assertive, more secure in diverse scenarios, reflecting a
solemnity and awareness beyond the immediacy of themselves. (Branching
Eyes, 2023)
“These canvases are life theaters,” says
Williamson, “inhabited by figures whose knowledge as children,
adolescents, and adults crosses time.” “One moment things are
calm,” she says, “the next a storm appears. The subjects in
her paintings struggle to weigh the shifting layers of their
experience.
Williamson, a native New Yorker, received a
bachelor's degree from Bennington College and a master’s degree in
painting from New York University. Among her awards are a Joan
Mitchell Foundation grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, and a
grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2017, a
retrospective, Philemona Williamson: Metaphorical Narratives, was
organized by Montclair Art Museum, NJ, with a catalog and essay by
chief curator Gail Stavitsky. Her work has been shown in many
one-person and group exhibitions throughout the United States and
abroad, including the IV Bienal International de Pintura en Cuenca,
Ecuador, in 1994. She is represented in numerous private and
public collections, including The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte,
North Carolina; Hampton University Museum, VA; Sheldon Art Museum,
University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE; Smith College Museum of Art,
Northampton, MA; Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; and AT&T.
Williamson’s first European solo exhibition,
in 2023 at Galerie Semiose in Paris, France garnered numerous
reviews from art critics and writers. In 2022, she received a
Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and she
won the coveted Anonymous Was A Woman prize, Susan Unterberg grant
program, New York
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