statement — Turner Williams Jr.

STATEMENT 2023

Phenomena of assemblage & improvisation define my process much more than any media.

My work begins with the fragmentary, a stand-in for the blinkered self & an instrument of allusion. The fragment suggests unseen wholes, intricate orders, & vast arcs of movement or form. The spontaneous assemblage of fragments offers dialogue between a subjectivity & something beyond it.

I collect fragments to scatter them arbitrarily. Scattering is an extension, the expansion of a node into a network. Noticing resonance between the nodes of this network, I interact with their interactions; adding, subtracting, adjusting. This process only occurs in the present. Editing is improvisation. Materials and movements surf contingency.

Boundaries leak, overlap, dissolve. Overlapping, interleaving, & nesting beget recursion, superimposition, and concrescence. There are always assemblages within assemblages, assemblages of assemblages.

The network of assembled fragments becomes a processual nexus. From the interactions of entangled, heterogenous parts, a new whole emerges with surprising properties that cannot be understood by examining it’s individual components. Oscillations between the whole and the parts charge the work with looping tension and unpredictable torsion. Under these strange forces, the assemblage acts upon itself. As information is created by this process, the assemblage’s initial fragmented nature, as well as its degrees of freedom and constraints, evolve into a more integrated development, a generative process.

My compositions are integrative hierarchies wherein the whole exerts influence upon its constituent parts while being simultaneously influenced by those parts. Improvising with assemblage, I tap it’s generative nature and invoke a strange collaborator, animating both work and process with uncanny life.

tbwjr, Marseille 2023