Rachel Eulena Williams, “Moon Marked” (2020), silkscreen on card, dye and acrylic paint on panel, canvas and cotton rope, 43 × 38 × 3 inches (courtesy the artist and Canada Gallery)
Over the past few years, Rachel Eulena Williams has honed a distinctive style of brightly colored, multi-dimensional abstract paintings. The artist reconfigures canvases that she removes from conventional supports, and collages a myriad of diverse materials onto them. While always interesting, recently the works have taken a decided turn for the better. The artist, who has been exhibiting since 2017, has developed a painting practice that eschews slick production. In her first solo show at Canada, she makes a case for the transgression of aesthetic conventions in abstraction, and the sociopolitical significance of such a transgression.
The show is titled Tracing Memory. It signals Williams’s interest in painting as a medium capable of containing layered histories.
