KANDIS WILLIAMS ‘Eurydice’ @nightgallery Los Angeles The exhibition is devoted to her performance and video work Eurydice, made and presented in site-responsive iterations from 2018 to 2020 and completed in 2021 as a two-channel video installation. The exhibition is concurrent with two other major presentations of Williams’ work currently on view in Los Angeles: a presentation of her collage work in the Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum and Huntington Libraries, and an exhibition devoted to her publishing company Cassandra Press at LAXART. Night Gallery’s exhibition highlights the place of video and performance in Williams’ practice, adding to the current citywide celebration of one of contemporary art’s great voices of inquiry and dissent. Williams’ Eurydice is an immersive two-channel video installation which includes footage of performances by the same name. These performances take the Greek myth of Eurydice as their starting point: Eurydice, daughter of the god Apollo, is sent to the underworld but offered rescue by her lover, Orpheus, under the condition that he not look at her until they have left. Despite his great journey to save Eurydice, Orpheus is unable to resist looking back at her, and she is immediately condemned back to eternity in Hell, lost in the act of being seen. Williams’ project revisits the myth’s dynamics of spectatorship and agency to explore the status of the Black figure as a symbol, co-opted in an immediate cycle of fetishization and erasure. Drawing from psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger’s structure of the “matrixial gaze,” the system of discontinuous influences from which we develop senses of identity, Williams surrounds the viewer with layered and contrasting images, challenging intuitive processes of reconciliation by embracing or rejecting a logic of coherence. Within these schema of representation and rupture, the viewer is left to their own devices, asked at once to draw from and discard the frameworks by which we make meaning of what we see. The footage included in Eurydice is taken from performances at different spaces worldwide. #kandiswilliams #nightgallery #losangeles #video #performance #contemporaryart (en Night Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/CQzHhTMFw91/?utm_medium=tumblr