DODGEgallery is pleased to present brown baby, an exhibition of new work by Lorna Williams. This is Williams’ first solo exhibition at DODGEgallery and her New York debut.

Driven by materiality, Williams’ creates mixed media collages, paintings, and sculptures, often fusing these practices. Born and raised in New Orleans, Williams’ practice reflects a deep seeded influence of music and performance, leading her to focus on the body as her tool and subject. Through an often laborious physical process, Williams distills collected material and imagery into amorphous figurative compositions.

I am fascinated by the functions that all materials, whether human-made or natural, are subject to performing and am always searching for the possible relationships among them—always seeking to assemble, arrange and connect them in ways that speak to concepts that I am visually processing. I use color, texture, pattern and found materials the same way that musicians use instruments—conjuring sounds that then are arranged and composed to produce music.

Williams’ work is as much born from her childhood as it is storytelling of cultural heritage and an articulation of her inner being. Through the process of connecting gathered and personal histories through material, Williams creates a new mythology, potent with symbology that speaks of life and death, the past and the present.

Her work is comprised of detritus from her life, including paper, branches, beads, bones, shells, bottles, dreadlocks and other items collected over the course of travels, living, and circumstance. Williams’ materials unify into abstracted figures that focus and dissolve, define and morph. The more sculptural her works, the more varying perspectives comprise a whole. The visually nomadic nature of her work embodies her own state of continual transformation distilled in the autobiographical exhibition title, brown baby.