STEPHANIE J. WILLIAMS
THE PLEASURE OF WASTED TIME
SEPTEMBER 10, 2023 - NOVEMBER 4, 2023
The Nicholson Project presents The Pleasure of Wasted Time, a solo exhibition by artist Stephanie J. Williams. “Animating stop-motion puppets is perhaps the most inefficient way to make my work. It demands my slowness,” says Williams. The Pleasure of Wasted Time reflects on this slowness and the importance of the care that comes with creating stop-motion films. The exhibition features a series of Williams’ stop motion short films along with an installation of the hand-built puppets, sculptures, and set pieces used in the creation of these films.
Animating physical material can be unpredictable and requires an improvisation inherent to stop motion; physical constraints of gravity and pose translate as extemporaneous movement-based physical “conversations” with material. Real material resists what the animator wills upon it. How an animator familiarizes themselves with a puppet is through touch, error, and walking. Williams poses the puppet, then walks back to the camera trigger. This is done thousands of times to create the illusion of continuous puppet movement. It is through a meditative sense of movement economy that Williams plans her walking path to and from the puppet; an accumulation of simple intimate gestures that choreograph careful discovery.
When she animates, Williams thinks about the strains on a human body that is declared a political object—the repeated stress of navigating precarious terrain. Over the past couple of years, she has been thinking about why the stories of some are marginalized. Recentering these stories requires care. It requires her slowness. She is most drawn to work that requires care through an accumulation of careful intimate gestures. Working frame by frame, the gesture(s) of a puppet in pose creates a collaborative ritual to bring attention to stories that are often forgotten and ignored.
About Stephanie J. Williams:
Stephanie J. Williams is a tinkerer and doodler. Her work primarily navigates hierarchies of taste, unpacking how “official” histories are constructed in order to understand contemporary social coding. She received her MFA in Sculpture from RISD under a Presidential Scholarship, has shown in Fictions, part of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s F-show exhibitions, as well as with Washington Project for the Arts, Lawrence University, the Delaware Contemporary, and the Walters Museum as a Sondheim Finalist, with residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo, Sculpture Space, Williams College, the Nicholson Project, VCCA, and ACRE. Recent projects have screened at the New Orleans Film Festival (Best Animated Short, 2022), Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival (Jury Citation, 2022), the Atlanta Film Festival (2023), and Outfest LA LGBTQIA+ Film Festival (2023). She has received support from the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund in Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University and multiple DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities Fellowships. She is based in DC/Baltimore and currently teaches stop motion as Full Time Faculty for Maryland Institute College of Art. For more information, visit www.stephaniejwilliams.com.