Bio
Born 1990, Augusta, Georgia
Lives and works in Western Massachusetts
Assistant Professor of Digital Art & Design
Department of Art Studio, Mount Holyoke College
MFA 2016, Time Based & Interactive Media
University of Pennsylvania
BFA 2012, Painting
Rhode Island School of Design
Marianna Dixon Williams (b. Augusta, GA, 1990) works in installation, video, sculpture, emerging media and analog electronics. Their work has been exhibited at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and the European Cultural Center's Palazzo Bembo during the 59th Venice Biennale, with a recent solo exhibition, Neon Moss, at Smith College's Oresman Gallery. Their collaborative video work was exhibited at the Oliewenhuis Art Museum (South Africa). Williams is the recipient of a Community Foundation of the CSRA grant. Their work has been featured in The Washington Post, The New York Times and Frieze.
Artist Statement
My work asks what it means to build instruments for perception, and what it means to wear them at the geographical thresholds where climate, history and belonging are felt together. I attend to landscapes and relationships in transformation, moving through sites with instruments built to register what ordinary perception misses.
The work takes shape through installation, video, sculpture and sound. I build tools I call fielding devices, which draw on early electronics and emerging technologies to register resonance, touch, feedback, infrared data and electromagnetic activity. Environmental data and physical indexes gathered from each site form life-sized intermedia installations that come into focus through the viewer's presence.
I work at edge conditions, ecological, geological, and social, where the stakes of perception are highest. The scale of the subject demands forms of attention that networked information and standard media cannot fully supply.