Moses Williams, “Vessels.” Image by Geoff Wichert

The five sculptures and one video that constitute Parable Bodies, the exhibition by Moses Williams now in the AIR Space at UMOCA, simulate living things using materials that are not alive, such as earth and light. That could be said of most art, of course: but it’s not quite like Michelangelo’s “David,” which was carved in marble dug from an Italian mountain top but meant to represent the Biblical teenager as a durable hero. Rather, these objects depict themselves: bodies that possess both static, mineral structures and attributes of living beings. In “Vessels,” coarse, mineral surfaces display flesh-like openings that depict soft, moist, pink interiors. Geometric, glassy fragments adhere to the surface around these holes the way rocks form around volcanos, but more intimate and with parallels to nests and burrows. In “Oracle II,” the orifice seems to have drawn up and puckered the entire diamond-shaped body and become large enough to show its lining of crystalline matter. There’s a science fiction possibility here, a potential narrative that the gold dripping like blood from the body in “Plunder My Side” emphasizes.

In the middle ages, the earth was conceived as a living body wherein rock circulated like blood, so that fossils from the ocean floor were eventually found on mountain tops. Scientists today find greater and less fanciful continuities between living and non-living matter. In this, they may be closing a loop that began in prehistory, when animistic spirits, including those of departed ancestors, were thought to inhabit the land, non-human living things, and even places. It was probably inevitable this would happen. After all, living things are made up of the same elements that comprise the rest of the universe, and behaviors once thought unique to life are increasingly turning out to be universal. Leading physicists now speak of the “evolution” of stars, planets, and their alternate form: energy. They’ve removed those quotation marks. Moses Williams all but literally breaks ground as an artist who wants to insert himself imaginatively beneath the skins of different objects in order to find a visual, and, in particular, a sculptural way of thinking about how we might re-imagine and re-configure creation.

One suggested way of “reading” Parable Bodies is to imagine that the five sculptures set in a circle around the gallery are objects that might have been encountered by the figure in “Last Walker,” the film projected on the wall behind them. Dressed entirely in black, the Walker invokes someone on a mission, who strides through and over the land as though it were already familiar. While the specific objects in the gallery aren’t in the film, some strikingly similar things are. The medium comes into its own when multiple exposures and inverse processes multiply the Walker, so that two or even three figures emerge and the connections between them become elastic, illustrating the artist’s assertion that “as material bodies, they merge into and/or pass through one another.” The sculptural array climaxes in an example that draws on a more familiar context, the “slippage, entanglement, and influence” between living things.

In theory, good art doesn’t create its content so much as it reveals and reflects what the artist finds in nature. Not everyone will accept or appreciate the implications of Moses Williams’ Parable Bodies. Not everyone accepted Charles Darwin’s evaluation of his Theory of Evolution, that “there is grandeur in this view of life.” However, instead of feeling a loss of status as uniquely living and soulful creatures in a static universe, we might see these revelations as an invitation to undertake a adventure that connects every living thing together.   

Still from Moses William’s “Last Walker.” Image courtesy of Utah Museum of Contemporary Art

Moses Williams: Parable Bodies, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, through June 1

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.