Kandis Williams’s (born in 1985 in Baltimore) versatile practice spans collage, performance, assemblage, publishing, and curating. Her work explores and deconstructs critical theory, addressing issues of race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism. Her meticulously compiled collages are densely layered, both in structure—through repetition of forms and figures—and in content, with an emphasis on politically loaded and libidinal images. Often inspired by history painting, these works are composed of images culled from magazines and archival texts, placed into an unsettling interplay. Williams considers these collages as a disintegration of photographic value into layered schematics.

Similarly, Williams’s performance practice explores coded social choreographies, emphasizing structural and systemic violence. In her performances, disembodied segments of text become collages, making up scripts for her performers. Through this process she proposes what she calls experimental pedagogy, a “consumption of academic texts that have a non- discursive output, an affective output that mythifies—weaving what kinds of knowledge are immediately relatable to an individual with the creation of a paradigm of thought.” In her collage series, Williams conflates stills of classical beauty with death masks and mythology. Each of these works layers eras (modern-day models alongside classical sculptures) while considering the history of staging itself. Williams offers viewers an opportunity to situate themselves, quite literally through reflection, in the dense and fractured compositions.