Brittney Leeanne Williams is a Chicago-based studio artist who is originally from LA. She attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017), and the School of the Art Institute (2008-2009). Her work has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Venice, Italy, San Francisco, and throughout the Midwest. Most recently, Brittney was the artist-in-residence at U Chicago's CSRPC/Arts + Public Life. She has also had residencies at Chicago Artists Coalition (HATCH Projects), as well as at Hyde Park Art Center's The Center Program.
My work explores the Black body as a site of suffering, memorialization, and
transcendence.
My fictional scenes with red bodies are constructed through excavating personal and familial experiences such as the full-figured female body, my grandmother’s flower bed, my family’s backyard lemon tree, the fragmented landmarks of my childhood homes. Drawing from color palettes and compositions of landscape painters such as Fairfield Porter, David Hockney, Alex Katz, and Gustave Courbet, I create surreal pastoral landscapes for these fictional bodies to roam. These symbolic bodies, embodying excavated personal family traumas, as well as Black communal grievances, carry the internal landscapes of home, family, and trauma into the idyllic pastoral landscape. I explore what happens when these environments collide.
I am interested in the body emitting a signal. My fictional red bodies interact with the landscape by: “falling into”, “bending towards”, “stacking onto”, or “burying inside.” Some completely fall into the landscape as a means of finding relief or transcendence. Others are inadequately buried, creating openings and portals as they bend over, either in reprieve or prayer. Still others, stacked, allude to a generational pattern, which resonate both as the passing down of a generational curse or burden, as well as the covering of maternal refuge. These bodies, arranged in contorted positions, align with unseen psychological states. Thus, the color red, becomes an obsessive apparatus or signal within the work, a marker of urgent exhaustion. Similar to an ambulance’s siren and red pulsing light, I want my bodies to authoritatively command the viewer’s gaze. The body’s urgent state, its need, its humanity, becomes most legible through the red vibrant skin. Rather than constructing Blackness through “black” skin, the use of red disrupts the viewer’s expectations, interpreting anew, the figure carrying the Black experience.