Sandy Williams IV
Artist Sandy Williams IV Discusses Melting Monuments and the American Flag
Wednesday, November 11
5 pm EST
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This Veteran’s Day, join multi-disciplinary artist Sandy Williams IV and curator Emily Alesandrini in conversation on the evolving role of monuments in our national landscape and the relationship between public art, historical memory, and political engagement. Williams will discuss his practice working with national mythologies and memorials, as well as the work pictured, Wax Monument IV (Free Wax), on view at Socrates Sculpture Park in through March of 2021. A monument to a living history, this wax flag can be set alight from multiple wicks and rests perpendicularly upon a mulch base shaped like the borough of Queens. Rendered in black and white, the wax flag is reminiscent of – but not equivalent to – the U.S.’s own flag and emblem of patriotism. Alive with transformative potential, the work invites participation, mark-making, melting, and molding of this malleable symbol.
Image above: Sandy Williams IV, Wax Monument IV (Free Wax), 2020, Wax, Wicks, and Mulch, Flag: 72 x 132 x 8 inches, Queens Mulch Map: 180 x 180 inches, Commissioned by Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Sandy Williams IV is an artist and filmmaker working in sculpture, cinema, performance, painting, photography, text, and the public, currently based between Richmond, VA and NYC. Williams received a BA in art from the University of Virginia, and graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media. Williams has shown both nationally and internationally.
Williams’ work explores the persistence of memory, the body, and resistance. Through this practice Williams performs acts of persistence, as a dynamic engagement with the historical, in pursuit of the threads that connect our diasporic origin stories to both the official record, and our colloquial histories. This work gives agency to both the artist and to the audience, to actively participate in the creation of future mythologies, and to work towards the emancipation of our public spaces. Williams is interested in the way time can be passed down, transformed, and gathered inside of us, as well as in the things around us, through a propensity towards permanence also called history. The work is persistence in opposition to permanence, to inspire functional histories for liberated social spaces in real-time.
Image above: Sandy Williams IV, Melting Monuments III, Digital Photographs Printed on Aluminum, 16 x 9 inches, Photo by KMDeco Creative Solutions: Mark DiConzo and courtesy of the artist.
Part of the Wax Monument series, the artist has been melting the Wax Monument candles in front of the monuments they were made after. Captured in both videos and as stills, these images visualize the change that the objects inspire.