NADA House 2021

An amphora, a funerary urn, plastic forks, and water bottles, formed from cast beach plastic in a fossilized jumble. Future archeologists misunderstand the function, they misplace the objects and the century. Who can possibly remember what went where, when it all gets buried together, impossible combinations of form and fancy.

Jeff Williams’ work is concerned with the properties of materials and their relationship to each other and over time. The artist combines and alters architectural materials and industrial waste as well as geological formations and quotidian objects in ways that induce and accelerate processes of erosion and decay and illuminate the elementary and sensory specificity of the materials. The work often functions as a form of research, predicated upon engineering principles, scientific theories and bodies of knowledge, such as processes of chemical reactions or ideas in physics, and undermines ideas around permanence and certainty within the built environment.