GRIFF WILLIAMS
DESCRIPTION WITHOUT PLACE
July 31 – September 4, 2021
GRIFF WILLIAMS
Moon Mountain No.1, 2021
acrylic on canvas over panel
56 x 84 inches
We like to identify the places we live as being distinct from other places. And we impose values upon them that focus on this implied uniqueness. In the poem “Description Without Place”, Wallace Stevens explores the idea that, “internally, we really live not in places themselves but in descriptions of places. When we describe a place, we describe how it seems to us, how it reflects our desires.”
GRIFF WILLIAMS
Moon Mountain No.2, 2021
acrylic on canvas over panel
56 x 42 inches
I was born and raised in Montana. Since leaving, I have returned every year over the course of my life. In that time, I’ve lived entirely in urban areas, but in some ways, I’ve never left Montana. It has alway had an outsized influence on my life. For many of us who live in the urban environment, nature has become synonymous with a form of escape, yet our experience of the landscape in the modern world has frequently been mediated through its idealized reproduction. Last year, my wife and I moved to Sonoma, California near the remains of Jack London’s home, which burned to the ground before he could occupy it. We live on Moon Mountain, an area of the Sonoma Valley that is beautiful, but soon after arriving, the area was once again ravaged by wildfire. Our home was not burned, but we are constantly reminded that the beauty and bucolic ideal of this place is in stark contrast to a very real and present danger. The awareness that our relationship to place is complex and often contradictory is at the root of my thinking about these paintings.
Griff Williams at Eli Ridgway Gallery, Bozeman, MT.
GRIFF WILLIAMS
Moon Mountain No.4, 2021
acrylic on canvas over panel
56 x 42 inches
During the pandemic, I, like many, spent a lot of time peering from the inside out. Looking out my window over the Sonoma Valley, I was struck by the metaphor of reflection. Not just transmissive light reflections, but cognitive reflection. I started out being visually seduced by reflected light, but gradually realized these paintings were metaphors for multiple viewpoints. Reality, as we experience it, depends entirely on the way we describe it, what we obscure and what we emphasize. It arises from our experience, shaped by individual taste and desire, and lodges in memory. As our memories are retold, they change ever so slightly with each recitation.
GRIFF WILLIAMS
Moon Mountain No.6, 2021
acrylic on canvas over panel
36 x 24 inches
I initially sketch these paintings out in segments, not unlike a paint by numbers system. I very much like the reductive nature of this method. The underlying drawing serves as a guide, but quickly gives way to the fluid, cumulative language of painting. When making any painting there is a question of what it means to make an image. I’m constantly torn between the ‘what’ of painting’s subject-matter, versus the ‘how’ of painting’s material presence. Recent paintings play across the lines where painting encounters matter, and matter becomes representation. Most of the new works have a grid within them. The grid has obvious art historical references: it serves as an organizing property, but also references a window sill. A physical thing that is rendered transparent in these paintings as a way of describing transience and impermanence.
Griff Williams at Eli Ridgway Gallery, Bozeman, MT.
GRIFF WILLIAMS
Moon Mountain No.9, 2021
acrylic on canvas over panel
56 x 42 inches
Like Stevens’ poem, these works consider a description, not of a place, but my desires, my idea of a place. One that is influenced by that which is visible and obscured. I conflate the inside and outside, to consider multiple perspectives and to acknowledge interdependencies. In that way, these works have a political component. They are not political paintings, but like all understanding, they are rooted in introspective reflection that looks both inward and outward.
GRIFF WILLIAMS
Moon Mountain No.11, 2021
acrylic on canvas over panel
61 x 41 inches
GRIFF WILLIAMS
Moon Mountain No.12, 2021
acrylic on canvas over panel
56 x 42 inches
Griff Williams at Eli Ridgway Gallery, Bozeman, MT.
GRIFF WILLIAMS
Moon Mountain No.15, 2021
acrylic on canvas over panel
48 x 36 inches
About Griff Williams
Griff Williams
Griff Williams is an American painter, publisher, filmmaker and gallerist. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums including the San Diego Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, and the San Jose Museum of Art. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Flash Art, Frieze, Artnews, SFAQ and others.
Williams earned his BFA from the University of Montana, Missoula in 1984 and his MFA The San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco in 1993. In 1993, he founded Gallery 16 and the pioneering fine art printmaking workshop Urban Digital Color in San Francisco. He has curated over 300 exhibitions and has worked with hundreds of artists including Lynn Hershman Leeson, William Kentridge, Jim Isermann, bell hooks, Rex Ray, Margaret Kilgallen, Mark Grotjahn, Paul Sietsema, Arturo Herrera, Michelle Grabner, and Ari Marcopoulos.
Williams has designed and published dozens of acclaimed books with the Gallery 16 Editions imprint including Los Quatro Reinas by Barry Gifford and David Perry, Bill by Bill Berkson and Colter Jacobsen, The Boy Who Would Be Tsar by Prince Andrew Romanoff. His recent books include The Gay Seventies: Hal Fischer is the first monograph to feature the complete collection of works Hal Fischer produced in San Francisco’s Haight and Castro neighborhoods in the 1970’s. His book on the life and artwork of the late San Francisco artist Rex Ray including essays by Rebecca Solnit and Christian Frock was published by Chronicle Books in 2020.
In 2021, Williams and his son Keelan made a feature film, Tell Them We Were Here, a documentary about eight of artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. The film was included in film festivals around the world including Doxa, On Art Poland, Moments Spain and Docfest. The San Francisco Chronicle stated “the Williamses see art as more than the exclusive domain of museums, galleries and collections, but as an essential component of a healthy society-something that can make communities not just more beautiful, but more functional.”
Williams was nominated for the SECA Award from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2000 and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Award in 2017. Williams has been an instructor at the California College of the Arts, the San Francisco Art Institute and Mills College.
Public collections of Williams' work include the Crocker Museum, Stanford Hospital, Neiman Marcus Collection, Progressive Insurance, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
The artist lives and works in Sonoma, California.