Justene Williams: Disobedient Bodies
VAULT examines Justene Williams’ shape-shifting practice with its focus on the body as both a material and subject matter for re-invention.
Image credit: Justene Williams, She Conjured the Clouds, 2020, performance still, Campbelltown Arts Centre, Sydney
In her 2011 video performance Crutch Dance, Justene Williams dons a makeshift costume of cardboard, magazine pages and tape to improvise a series of absurdist actions against a Mondrian-esque grid of red, yellow, black and white. Across 12 channels, the artist simultaneously camouflages herself in the backdrop, hobbles around on crutches and jogs on a treadmill. To what end, it’s not entirely clear. Writing about the work in frieze magazine at the time, curator Justin Paton suggested: “What comes through unmistakably here is the theme of perseverance, of art as a blind mission that carries its maker uncertainly between toil and joy.”1
Williams’ genre-bending practice now spans 30 years. Originally a photographer, the artist’s chaotic, multi-channel video installations of the past decade have given way to live performance and sculpture projects which collapse art history and autobiography into a DIY aesthetic.
Graduating from the influential now-defunct visual arts program at the University of Western Sydney in 1991, Williams first came to prominence with photographs that pushed the boundaries of the medium. Her early oeuvre comprised blurry images made using analogue techniques that suggested the body in movement, foreshadowing the artist’s performative turn. Characterised by their saturated colour, the images were shot in shopping centres, music halls and strip clubs, a nod to Williams’ suburban upbringing. As a teenager, the artist worked in cabaret, singing and dancing at the South Sydney Junior Leagues Club, and her father owned a wrecking yard. These formative experiences infiltrate the...Subscribe to read this article in full
