The Gallery of Revolution presents
Wake Work*
always to rupture the present
Opening Date: Sunday, October 15, 2023 from 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm
In Gallery: October 15 – December 31
Gallery Hours: Mondays, Wednesdays, & Fridays – 10 am - 2 pm or by appointment
Wake Work* examines violences visited on Black people at the hands of the American state and attends to the paradoxes of Black life and death in this anti-Black world.
In response to violent annotations and redactions made on Black lives by the police in all their forms, this work resists and refuses those terrors as captured in still images by employing “Black redaction and annotation.” Departing from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, “Black redactions and annotations” reveal new ways of seeing the systems made visible in these images and the violences those systems enact. Further, this work examines the absurdity of what emerges from the wake when calls to redress systems that deliver anti-Black terror are met with empty, performative remedies.
In Sharpe’s words, “Black redaction and...annotation are ways of imagining otherwise.” To that end, this work reshapes ways of seeing terror and timelessness captured in photos of anti-Black state violence. These experiments create disturbances, open wounds, and produce wakes in these representations of Black people in distress by cutting away at images, recomposing them, transforming them into new, abstract, dimensional objects, viewing them through the lens of critical texts, and treating those texts as both material and frame. This process poses questions about anti-Blackness, the optics of state violence and empty gestures to redress harm, temporality, and consciousness.
Brief Biography
Lauren Williams (she/they) is a Detroit-based designer, researcher, and educator. They work with visual and interactive media to understand, critique, and reimagine the ways social and economic systems distribute and exercise power over Black life and death.
Through her creative practice and research, Lauren often investigates Blackness, identity, bodiliness, and social fictions to examine how racism is felt, embodied, and embedded into institutions. Themes of trust and the transformations enabled by social engagement shape both her approaches—collaboration, facilitation, collective production—and the questions she examines surrounding power and oppression, social relations, and social movements.
Lauren currently teaches at the University of Michigan’s Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Studies and the Digital Studies Institute. Previously, she taught design + interdisciplinary studios and intensives at the College for Creative Studies, ArtCenter College of Design, CalArts, and elsewhere. In the past, she managed programs and policies aimed at cultivating economic justice at Prosperity Now in DC. Recently, Lauren has been awarded residencies and grants by the UM Arts Initiative, the Kresge Foundation, the Art for Justice Fund, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, Wa Na Wari, the Detroit Justice Center, and Red Bull Arts in Detroit. Currently, they are a member of the Center for Cultural Power’s Narrative Design Lab. Going forward, Lauren is finding ways to align their capacities with revolutionary movements that build toward different socioeconomic systems entirely and usher in new dimensions of power and freedom all together.