{"id":74648,"date":"2024-04-16T09:22:22","date_gmt":"2024-04-16T16:22:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=74648"},"modified":"2024-06-05T18:36:01","modified_gmt":"2024-06-06T01:36:01","slug":"moses-williams-explores-static-forms-living-essence-in-umocas-parable-bodies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/moses-williams-explores-static-forms-living-essence-in-umocas-parable-bodies\/","title":{"rendered":"Moses Williams Explores Static Forms, Living Essence in UMOCA’s “Parable Bodies”"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Moses Williams, “Vessels.” Image by Geoff Wichert<\/p><\/div>\n

The five sculptures and one video that constitute Parable Bodies<\/i>, 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\u2019s not quite like Michelangelo\u2019s \u201cDavid,\u201d 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 \u201cVessels,\u201d 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 \u201cOracle II,\u201d 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\u2019s a science fiction possibility here, a potential narrative that the gold dripping like blood from the body in \u201cPlunder My Side\u201d emphasizes.<\/h4>\n

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 \u201cevolution\u201d of stars, planets, and their alternate form: energy. They\u2019ve 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.<\/h4>\n