Yesterday is Melting

Sandy Williams IV

Featuring ANTIESTABLISHED, 
Mariana Parisca, Monsieur Zohore

April 1 - May 28, 2022

Co-curated by Matthew Kyba and Megan Kammerer

Yesterday is Melting encapsulates a relentless pursuit of public agency and free will in the face of colonial institutions, governmental power, and increasing social amnesia. Sandy Williams IV implicates audiences to acknowledge how we observe and participate in history. From the reconceptualization of public monuments to the unspoken implications of unattended luggage or the sociopolitical index captured in currency, Williams strikes a balance in tension. They interplay the untouchable and the malleable, the passage of time and the infallible memory, the transparent and the concealed to encourage the viewer’s participation in history-making.

Additional works by ANTIESTABLISHED (Kate Turner, Warren Jones, and Williams), Mariana Parisca, and Monsieur Zohore respond to Williams’ engagement in the emancipation of public space. Together their disparate works unravel common structures of power and repression in the Americas.

Image: Sandy Williams IV, Wax Monument VII (Free Wax 2.2), Wax, Wicks, 16" x 24" x 42", 2021.

Artist Biographies

Sandy Williams IV is an artist and educator currently based in Richmond, VA. Their work is about the persistence of memory, the body, and resistance, tasking audiences with agency, to generate both public and private opportunities for collaborative engagement. They make efforts in visualizing pathways towards the emancipation of our physical, conceptual, and emotional landscapes. They work both within and outside of institutions to clarify, make transparent, and undo some of the temporal manipulations and spatial paradigms of oppression that exist in and around us. Williams' work in sculpture, film, text, and public performance inspires functional histories for liberated social spaces in real-time. 

They completed their undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia, and earned an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University in the department of Sculpture + Extended Media. They are currently an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Richmond. Recent exhibitions at Reynolds Gallery (Richmond), de boer Gallery (LA), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), New Release (New York), Springsteen Gallery (Baltimore), Guadalajara 90210 (Mexico City), 1708 Gallery (Richmond). Residencies include ACA (Florida), MassMOCA (Massachusetts), SOMA (Mexico City), ACRE (Chicago), The University of Cumbria (UK), among others. Currently exhibiting at the University of Richmond Museum, and NADA House with New Release Gallery in NYC.

ANTIESTABLISHED is a multidisciplinary collective of artists whose interests lie on an intersection between art, noise, fashion design, popular culture, and politics. Through their collaborative efforts and imaginations they work to generate loving visions of the future, by perpetrating moments of visceral liberation in the present. ANTIESTABLISHED includes Warren Jones, Kate Tuner, and Sandy Williams IV.

Warren Jones is a creator living in Virginia, Copenhagen, and Berlin. The meaning dictates the means, using all tools to carve out a space

Kate Turner is a visual artist and writer from West Chester, Ohio. She uses various art-making processes including installation, film, fashion, and performance to abstract memories and experiences she has from growing up as the product of a trans-racially adopted child in the midwest. Through her stories she hopes to examine contemporary issues surrounding identity, race, and gender - what it was like forging an identity in a place that claimed to be colour blind. Turner received a BFA in sculpture from Bowling Green State University and an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Sandy Williams IV is an artist and educator whose work explores concepts of time, historical landscapes, colloquial records, national mythologies, and the dissemination of popular culture. Williams is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist trained in sculpture and film, whose practice has expanded to include photography, painting, bookmaking, archiving, photography, and public performance. The work is consistently research-based, site-specific, collaborative, and interactive.

Mariana Parisca is an interdisciplinary visual artist and educator from the USA and Venezuela. Their research investigates the way contemporary global capitalism and its modern colonial precedents create systems of belief that promote a dissociated spiritual relationship to matter. Through a decolonial feminist approach, she creates performances, sculptures, installations, videos, and printed matter, that question and redefine the social abstractions that shape value, resource distribution, and consumption in the Americas. Their work nurtures powers of renewal and abundance in order to open up new modes of valuing and relating to our bodies and the Earth. 

Parisca received an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media department at Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA in Studio Art and Anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis. Parisca’s work has shown at Mas Allá, Bogota, Colombia, Rudimento in Quito, Ecuador, NARS Foundation in New York City, NY, the New Wight Biennial in Los Angeles, CA, the Virginia Museum of History and Culture, Anderson Gallery, and Cherry Gallery in Richmond, VA, the Virginia MOCA in Virginia Beach, VA, Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO, and New Works Gallery in Chicago, IL among others. Mariana has received various awards including an Emergency Grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, the Eliot Scholarship, and the Paul F. Miller Scholarship. They have been artist in residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts, Nave Proyecto, Vermont Studio Center, the St. Louis Story Stitchers, and are currently a resident at Studio Two Three and Visual Arts Center in Richmond, VA. They currently teach at George Mason University.

Monsieur Zohore is an Ivorian-American artist based in Richmond, VA. His practice is invested in the consumption and digestion of culture through the conflation of domestic quotidian labor with art production. Through performance, sculpture, installation, and theater, his practices explore queer histories alongside his Ivorian-American heritage through a multi-faceted lens of humor, economics, art history, and labor.

He received his BFA from the Cooper Union in 2015 and his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020. Zohore is the 2020 recipient of the WPA and Warhol Foundation Wherewithal Research Grant, as well as the 2021 Trawick Young Artist Prize. His work has been exhibited in numerous venues including Sprus Gallery (Beijing) Tick Tack (Antwerp), Galleria Bianconi (Milan), de boer (Los Angeles), 56 Henry (New York), Springsteen (Baltimore), Canada Gallery (New York), and Jack Barrett Gallery (New York) as well as at the 2020 and 2021 Nada Art Fair (Miami) and the 2020 Material Art Fair (Coyoacan, CMDX). Zohore has also been invited to show projects at The Jonah Bokaer Foundation (Hudson), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York), The Rochester art Center (Rochester), The Baker Museum (Naples) The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore), Washington Projects for the Arts (Washington D.C.), and at The Columbus Museum of Art (Columbus). Zohore is currently the Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at Virginia Commonwealth University. Monsieur Zohore lives and works in Richmond, VA and New York, NY.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.