ATM/DFW

Group Exhibition

TARO WAGGONER

XXAVIER CARTER

BRIAN JONES

BRIAN SCOTT

KEER TANCHAK

JOSHUA GOODE

CELIA MUNOZ

ANDREA TOSTEN

CELIA EBERLE

TABATHA TROLLI

HEYD FONTENOT

ERIN STAFFORD coming home: paintings by sarah williams at Talley Dunn Gallery by Cinzia Franceschini

Anyone knows the feeling of melancholy that blazes when returning, as an adult, to the place where you grew up: it is a punch in the stomach at the sight of your parent’s house, the old elementary school, and the local stores that have changed management, storefronts, and purpose over the years. We move through the grid of streets of which we know every turn and view, but they appear even more mysterious. Everything is overwhelmingly familiar, yet so distant.

Artist Sarah Williams (b. Kansas City, MO, 1984) embodies that feeling in her works: a blurred nostalgia that borders on disorientation. Her paintings – intimate, unsettling, and ghostly – show the way home at the precise moment one realizes that it is not home anymore. They display small towns that seem still and anonymous but are dense with overlapping, little stories. And among those layers is yours.

Talley Dunn Gallery exhibits Staying Home, a selection of paintings realized by Sarah Williams between 2018 and 2023. In this body of works, the artist draws heavily on her personal story as a young woman growing up in the rural Midwest, Missouri, from which she moved away in her university years in the urban setting of Dallas/Fort Warth only to return in recent times. Williams investigates the concept of home and its precariousness, its constant relativization according to life’s stages and experiences. At the Talley Dunn Gallery, as in a cinematic film, small-format paintings show houses, bungalows, and petrol stations at twilight. It seems to follow a camera, slowly shooting a Midwestern town and its vernacular architecture. The streets have precise names such as West Crocker Street, North Lincoln Street, or Noah

// whitehead street, 2021 18h x 24w

Lane but, at the same time, they could be anywhere. They are well-known places by the painter, yet they seem imaginative visions.

Williams’ art practice emanates a surrealist fascination. Her painted homes embody a sense of mystery that recall the buildings of a contemporary René Magritte or Edward Hopper. Aspects of ordinary life become an enigma. They are something always under the eye but hitherto unnoticed. In the Staying Home series, the artist plays with the indoor and outdoor spaces, creating connections between the visible and invisible. We see the appearance of these houses from the outside, sensing their silence and desolation, but we also know that they are inhabited inside. They are not ghostly or abandoned architectures: life is flowing inside. The lights are on.

The artist achieves to create this haunting atmosphere by choosing glowing colors and livid tones. Yellowish-greenish hues and the bluish sky contribute to give a sense of isolation. The study of light also plays a key role in her paintings. She focuses on light sources on different surfaces, creating contrast between atmospheric and artificial lights.

The ultimate in modern chill.

Williams’ blurred houses appear distant. It is certainly a physical and geographical gap, but above all an emotional one. Buildings have renewed or degraded, and some may even disappear. The point of view is external: it is the perspec- tive of the witness, not the inhabitant. Her paintings restore the perception of those watching from the outside the time passing over familiar things. And inevitably changing them.

The approach of Sarah Williams to her images is strongly influenced by her experience. She was raised in Brookfield, Missouri, a rural town of the Midwest, with a population of just over 4,000 and immersed in pasture and cropland.

After earning her BFA, she completed her MFA in Drawing and Painting at the University of North Texas in 2009. She ‘returned home’ to be a Professor of Painting at Missouri State University in Springfield. She has relevant solo exhibitions in Wyoming, Texas, and Missouri and her works are part of collections of major museum institutions, including the Art Museum of South Texas, the Microsoft Art Collection, the University of North Texas, and William Woods University in Missouri. Her paintings cover a time span of different phases of her life and related scenarios.

The series exhibited at Talley Dunn Gallery tells an intimate yet collective story, with which many viewers can spontaneously identify. It tells about the small-town life that shapes our identity, despite the physical and sentimental miles that may be interposed. Staying Home is like an overnight road trip among silent and desolate places we once called home. It is a return to the homeland after a period of distance and it also represents a moment of lucid awareness. Everything has changed its appearance because the first ones to change were us. Home will never be that home anymore.

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