Description Without Place

Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Description Without Place, a solo exhibition of ten new acrylic paintings by Griff Williams. 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 — that when we describe a place, we describe how it seems to us, how it reflects our desires.

Born and raised in Montana, Williams has spent his adult life in urban centers while returning home every year — and in some ways never leaving. For many who live in cities, nature has become synonymous with escape, yet our experience of the landscape is so often mediated through its idealized reproduction. These paintings were made on Moon Mountain in the Sonoma Valley, a place of striking beauty soon again ravaged by wildfire, where the bucolic ideal stands 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 his thinking about these works.

During the pandemic, peering from the inside out across the valley, Williams was struck by the metaphor of reflection — not only transmissive light, but cognitive reflection. What began as a seduction by reflected light became paintings about multiple viewpoints: reality as something that depends entirely on how we describe it, on what we obscure and what we emphasize. Sketched out in segments like a paint-by-numbers system, the works give way to the fluid, cumulative language of painting, most carrying a grid that doubles as a window sill rendered transparent — a way of describing transience and impermanence.

"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."