STATEMENT
My projects explore and interpret through performance, video, objects and images, the ways that soft technologies in conjunction with hard technologies, facilitate the rendering and surrendering of the body over time. My work maps the past onto geographies of the present to interrogate the material and immaterial possibilities of inheritance, memory, and storytelling.
The work is rooted in questions of authority, parafiction, freedom and its opposite(s), race, gender, labor, and love through an historical lens. It addresses these interests as they pertain to my life: a modern life existing as it does as a consequence of known and unknown literal and figurative ancestors.
The fourth wall; the threshold between the audience and the performance, the work and the world, the onlooking crowd and the troublesome ‘other’, across which mystical mimetic relationships occur—is of ongoing interest. The work works on me as I hope it works on viewers; providing insight not only into how history is understood, but how it is felt.
About
MARISA WILLIAMSON is a project-based artist who works in video, image-making, installation and performance around themes of history, race, feminism, and technology.
Recent projects include the creation and management of Unsettling Grounds, a project-based artist residency for which local BIPOC artists proposed virtual monuments housed in an augmented reality mobile application site-specific to the Historic Charlottesville Woolen Mill. She is developing installation, performance, and digital projects in Charlottesville and nationally that invite questions about how the historical landscape is marked by certain narratives while others remain buried.
Williamson’s work has been awarded grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Charlottesville Area Community Foundation, Virginia Humanities, The Graham Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, and the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.
Her work has been featured in exhibitions at SOHO20, and BRIC in Brooklyn, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NYC), Vox Populi and the Print Center in Philadelphia, Mana Contemporary Chicago, Human Resources (LA), Stefania Miscetti gallery in Rome, and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), in Berlin. She was a participant in the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2012 and the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 2014-2015. Williamson holds a BA from Harvard University and an MFA from CalArts. She is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at the University of Virginia with a research focus on Blackness.
email: marisa@marisawilliamson.com
The Angels of the Artist Marisa Williamson, Charles Mudede, Feb. 7th 2020, The Stranger.
The Jacob Lawrence Gallery Announces the 2020 Recipient of the Jacob Lawrence Legacy Residency, Nov. 19th 2019, Capitol Hill Times, Seattle, Washington
Responsibility, Caldera Magazine, Zoe Rayn, February 28, 2018
Take Two: The World of Marisa Williamson, Lynnette Miranda, Pelican Bomb, September 15, 2016
Marisa Williamson Asks: ‘What Would Sally Do?’ Kate Mothes, Young Space, June 14, 2014