Collin Williams

I believe these things about art. It is a practice that mirrors life. It is a practice of coping that captures something of living, bearing witness to the complexities of life. Every artwork is an artifact of marks, marking out a moment in time, marking the boundary of our experience as a space for the exploration of what we find meaningful. Art is an artifact of the cultural space that exists between the artist, the audience and the artwork. As such, an artwork is a reflection of its time. Art mirrors our culture and within it we see, however imperfectly, some semblance of ourselves and what it means to be human. The integrity of the artist is as a witness, testifying to the reality that safety is an illusion. Individually the ascent of our passions or the depths of our pain are insignificant beyond the boundaries of memory. It is through art that we understand that we are not alone in our passion and pain and through the conduit of art perhaps we mitigate, celebrate or at least acknowledge our ferocity and fragility as humans. In this work I intend to capture the intricacies of the current cultural crisis that we are facing as we navigate the Covid 19 pandemic and to reflect on the complexity of our individual and cultural response. This work is an artifact of a time. It is a visceral, emotive and intellectual artifact of an unprecedented time of national crisis. This piece and the larger body of work that it represents, are a Covid time capsule, if you will. The work reflects the complexity of crisis; fractured, a myriad array of imagery that has the tension of apparent chaos but with an underlying system suggesting a structure in collapse or in stasis between structural collapse and reorder, between the disintegration of an old order and the reimagining of a new world.

Collin Williams is a Professor of Art and the director of the New Media concentration at the University of Montevallo. He received his MFA and BFA from the University of Houston, University Park. His teaching expertise spans a range of topics including digital photography and printing, animation, 3D animation, web media, mixed media, digital video and screen-printing. Williams’ personal work investigates a multi-disciplinary approach to art exploring installation, motion graphics, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and sound based works.

Space One Eleven Involvement: Windows 2008; Windows 2017; CCA Teaching Artist Summer 2019