Elysian
2018 - Photography (Photography)
101.6 x 76.2 cm
D’Angelo Lovell Williams
On January 7th, 2020, artist D’Angelo Lovell Williams was diagnosed with HIV. Only a handful of chosen family members knew up until the public announcement that coincided with the release of this body of work. According to the artist, “discovery” is key to this group of large photographs. Drawing from moments of love, intimacy and kinship. They use their body in the home and the landscape to reconcile with shared history. “In the images,” they write, “I aim to puncture the realm of self-awareness, creating a space where the spirits of black bodies can live freely in their encounters with one another.” At such a large scale, Elysian is much more than a photograph, it is a portal into another world. The artist describes the work, “the earth engulfs me as I pull the love of my life into the unknown.” This image is a metaphor for being seen, for hiding, for coming out, for intimacy and privacy. Indeed, these are significant motifs, still, for the gender queer community. This image shows the artist partially submerged in a wall of palm fronds, used in architecture in much of Latin America, but here they appear natural, a veil of sun-greyed jungle. The photographs in this series, most showing figures in various degrees of undress, are both tender and seductive. “Confident, tender hands cradle loved ones… gestures of both defiance and care.”
D’Angelo Lovell Williams is a photographer whose work depicts queer black intimacy, seeking to expand the narratives that surround this issue with their images. The artist stages themself alongside family members and lovers, in one image their head lays in their mother’s lap. Challenging the dominant modes of depiction in art history, which the artist diagnoses as straight, white and male, their images reclaim the narrative over the depiction of blackness and of queerness and are at once vulnerable and strong.
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