Things That Are Not Meant to Work: An Interview of Folk Artist Justin Williams on The Occasion of His Solo Exhibition @ Roberts Projects LA

Oil and acrylic painting by Justin Williams. Jade, the artist's wife, reclines on a sofa behind a fortune teller.

Justin Williams
Major Arcana, death watching over Jade (2024)
Acrylic, oil, raw pigment and gold pigment on canvas
77.25 x 84.75 in (196.2 x 215.3 cm)

interview by Chimera Mohammadi

In Justin Williams’s newest exhibition, Synonym, at Roberts Projects, waves of stories collide and crash across timelines, pouring onto the canvas in lush and decadent palettes. Williams creates wormholes between his ancestral memories and the present day. His work carves spaces, ranging from cozy to claustrophobic, in which dead and living strangers coexist in moments of imagined connection. Williams’ world is seen through a kaleidoscope of childhood trinkets, native flora, and mythologized fauna, from goats to dogs to horses. The artist collects moments and mementos alike to collage in these quiet yet fantastical dreamscapes, mining through Westernized memories of suburban Australia and hitting rich veins of ancestral Egyptian aesthetics. Williams embraces the awkwardness of outsider life, and his work embodies the comforting realization that even outsiders create their own exiled community. To mark the occasion of Synonym, he discusses stories and people, which echo throughout his life and strangers whose moments of grief have shaped his work. 

CHIMERA MOHAMMADI: I wanted to start off by asking what a day in your practice looks like.

JUSTIN WILLIAMS: I've tried to level out a lot. I got married, met [my wife] Jade, and I'm kind of trying to be normal in a weird way. It's been really productive, forcing myself to sort of start at 9:00 and work ’til dinnertime or whatever. And that might not be working – I might just sit on the couch and look at a painting and be like, “That looks ridiculous.” It's basically just get up, start making marks, and then from there, I'll kind of lose time.

MOHAMMADI: Your upcoming show at Roberts Projects, which looks gorgeous, is entitled Synonym. Is there a meaning behind that title for you?

WILLIAMS: Titles and names for paintings and things like this, it's a real collage, and an abstract process because I'm super dyslexic. So, I like words in the sense of how they sound, and it could be related to the show. It [Synonym] feels really circular. One painting might be about a weird transitional experience, or a story, or a secondhand story, or cults where I'm from, or these things. I tried to distill it into one thing, thinking that that's like what you're meant to do as an artist, but then I'd rather the painting inform what the show is. So, if one painting’s about this guy I knew growing up called Baba Desi, the Belgrave Wizard — and I love the fact that he was just this weird dude that worked at a post office, really suburban, normal, nice guy, who had a full meltdown and decided he wanted to carve sticks and be a wizard. And I'm like, What the fuck? Where did that point happen? This in-between moment. One painting would lend itself to that, and then the next painting might be a portrait of Jade and all my fears and feelings I didn’t even know I had about normality, coping with that through a painting. They're two very separate topics, and I was always like, Fuck, is it too schizophrenic or not cohesive to show altogether? But it all comes back to self-portraits. Like, Why am I interested in these things? So, it's one topic, but it's split off on a journey. 

 
Oil painting by Justin Williams. Baba Desi, a wizard, stares at a goblet, wearing a coat covered in faces.

Justin Williams
The Belgrave wizard-Baba Desi (2024)
Acrylic, oil and raw pigment on canvas
48 x 36 in (121.9 x 91.4 cm)

 

MOHAMMADI: Do you consider yourself a figure within this sort of mythology of the ordinary that you're creating in your work? Or are you an outside spectator looking in? What's your relationship to it? 

WILLIAMS: I feel like the ones that are more successful, it's like I'm a spectator. Sometimes I know the story, but I always want it to feel like this moment when something weird's happening at a park or a friend's house. It's like, you know what's going on, and you kind of walk past, but you can be drawn in, or you can not go into it, but you know you want to find out about it later. I like those ones where it's this banal jumping off point. And sometimes, when it's to do with stories, as opposed to things that I've experienced, they're really interesting. It's a lot of things through my grandma and her side through Alexandria, [Egypt] and the stories that just seem so normal, the way she says this shit. I made this painting of her, because she got bitten by a scorpion. There's two different types of scorpions. One will kill you and one won't. And she's like, “Oh, we made the nanny suck the poison out of the bite to make sure because it could have killed me or not killed me until the Bedouin doctors arrived.” And I'm like, “Fuck. You just put this poor lady's life in danger, and you got bit by a scorpion, which is crazy for me anyway.” But the way my mind is interpreting that is through a painting, and I've made that painting a couple of different times because I want to think of what my [grandma] Norma was thinking. Also, the experience of this probably 20-year-old lady that's not getting paid that well, sucking poison out of this young girl. Everyone was okay, and it's all fine, but it's this weird magical world.

MOHAMMADI: You've said that your grandparents’ migration from Egypt wasn't really discussed in your family, and it's a very prominent theme in your work. I was curious if the tension between your connection to that culture and your familial distance from that heritage has informed your work?

WILLIAMS: I've wanted to go and do residencies there [in Egypt], but you know when you listen to a song, say you're going through a gnarly breakup and there's a particular song that carries you through it, and you know that in ten years when you listen to it, you're going to think of Simon or some shit? It's precious. You won't put it on all the time. I want to be ready when I go to Egypt and spend time because I'm not a holiday painter either. You’ve got to understand, too, Australia in general, and especially where I was from, is an ancient civilization mixed with a really young culture. If you don't become a builder or a plumber, love surfing and football … it's just happy and dumb in a fucked up way. And I hated football, all that shit, so much that I really thought there was something wrong with me. And then, you mix in my mum's side, going to primary school with a fucking bowl of tabouli and some falafels, I'm like, Fuck that. Give me white bread and a sandwich so no one thinks I'm weird. My dad's side's full of Irish convicts. That’s where the name Williams comes from. And so, I was able to fit in really well with a group of normal Australian people, but secretly, I'm like, Fuck, I love art, and I want to know about Matisse. So, I think being an observer, an outsider, in these kinds of situations, is overall what I feel the work's about.  

MOHAMMADI: What does it mean to be an outsider? 

WILLIAMS: I think everyone is in a certain aspect of the word, but it's like, who fights? You feel more comfortable if you fit into a culture. It makes things seem right. So, if you're in between, or you're listening to what you know is actually legit to yourself, it's a weird friction. For a long time, I felt like I was pretending. Now I'm awkward and the paintings feel awkward and I'm okay with that. If you're at a dinner party or whatever, the people that are cool and boring, they won't really gravitate to the weird, overweight accountant-looking dude or whatever. But that's the guy you want to talk to. He's the best. I'm really fascinated by authenticity, even if it's wrong and misguided. You know, when you've got some cool people coming over, so you're not going to put on the music that you're actually listening to? I want to put on the music that I actually listen to and be pathetic. That's the feeling that I want. And that's okay.

MOHAMMADI: How does this outsider status or culture inform the creation of the fictional communities and moments of togetherness that take center stage in your work? 

WILLIAMS: It goes back to trusting in the work. It's like collage in a way. So, it might be two stories. A good example is one of the paintings, This trap I lay for you, about this guy, Neil. I used to cut up firewood for these bed and breakfast type things in this town called Sassafrass, which is a bit bougie in the hills for glamping kind of couples. Neil was the coolest looking dude. He had this big, massive beard, and this huge goat, which was kind of weird in this area. One day, I was dropping his firewood off, and he's out front, holding an Angora goat. It's this red color and it was dead. Its neck was sagging, and he's bawling out, crying. I was like, "Oh, you okay?" He was like, "Fucking dead. It's dead." The goat had eaten an old gasoline can. He’d had this goat for a really long time. I was like, “Oh, that's really sad. I'm sorry about your goat.” And he's like, “No, you don't understand. It was my late wife's goat. The goat's dead. My brother's dead.” So, I went over there thinking, I'll listen to the bullshit and whatever. But it fucking broke me because he was totally in love with this lady. The way he described it was this beautiful romance. They had an antique shop, which was why his house and backyard was just filled with shit. She died of cancer. The goat was hers because she wanted to make jumpers out of it. It was just this real sense of loss. That was the last straw, this dumb goat that he didn't even like. He hated the fucking goat. But it was a really sad, beautiful moment. I felt like I'd gone into a painting in a way, and he'd given me a gift in that sorrow too. I made that painting a lot of times. So I'll think, I'm going to make that painting from the perspective of Neil. And then aesthetically, it just comes down to something that looks better than something else. I'll have to get rid of Neil, and then another figure that’s in there might look like my dad. And then, the story is suddenly about two random stories coming together that don't mix. They don't make sense. But for me, I know exactly what's going on.

Oil painting by Justin Williams of a man digging in front of a cabin.

Justin Williams
This trap I lay for you (2024)
Acrylic, oil and raw pigment on canvas
76.5 x 86.75 in (194.3 x 220.3 cm)

MOHAMMADI:  I was interested in the prominence of nature in your work because you're a portrait artist and people are the focus of your work. But even your indoor pieces have these little lush pockets of flora and often a dog or a horse, and I was curious about what these natural motifs represent for you. 

WILLIAMS: Most of the work is from where I grew up. When people think of Australia, they'll think of beaches or desert, but where I'm from was prehistoric looking, in a way, and almost more indicative of a European forest. You've got these really old ferns. And my dad's a landscape gardener too, and he's like Google. You can be like, "What the fuck's this plant?" He'd be like, "It's a Pacificus Metallicus. It originates from South Africa and the Roman gypsies brought it in through the desert.” And all this kind of shit that you don't need to know. So, the plant-based stuff is pretty much where I'm from. And being in Santa Fe, the landscape is very different here. Sometimes I'll bring in some of that kind of stuff. Again, it's that collage type of thing. My cameras are filled with really boring things like a fence and a little path. I'll use these little things for reference, but I don't want too much information either. I like to give myself a little bit of an idea of how to do stuff and then not print them off really big and know how to fucking make it work. The shadows are all wrong. They're things that are not meant to work. It helps convey awkwardness within the work. But yeah, a lot of the plants just come from where I'm from. And growing up, too, [my grandparents], they're the first people I'd ever known that had indoor plants. I thought it was crazy. Plants inside the house! It blew my mind. I mean, now it's really normal, but that ’90s thing for Dad was potpourri and dried shit. So, these lush green things were like an art class and over the top. I fucking love it. Mum would be like, “Ah, it's disgusting. Trying to fit in.” 

MOHAMMADI: What role does your ancestry play in your life? Are ancestors guides, reservoirs of material, inspirations, missing persons?

WILLIAMS: As I got older I was like, Fuck, that's pathetic. I should have been embracing this shit and finding out more. It's been a real race for me. Now [my grandma] Norma's ninety-eight. She hasn't really got long to go, and she doesn't really make that much sense anymore. So, I'm just really trying to get as much information from her, and Mum as well, but Mum's like, “No, we're Australian.” That's it. Within my family too, Mum's like, “I don't know where this art shit came from.” It's apologetic almost. But I've accepted that's what I'm doing, and they've accepted, “Okay, if we don't hear from Justin for three months, that's fine.” But I think opening that door—because I was already painting and drawing and doing a lot of things before I really wanted to know where it came from—it helps me accept that artistic side of why I'm interested in these ideas. And because art wasn't really a thing. They just would have a really beautiful ceramic dish that they used for something. It has to be over the top and lavish and beautiful. And so, I liked these little objects, like a lamp with a camel attached to it or some shit. It's tacky and pitch almost, but every object had a weird, over-the-top kind of thing. It stood out a lot more because you're in this beige, suburban, claustrophobic environment. So you can tell, Oh, fuck, that's not from here. You can't get that down at 7-Eleven. That's from somewhere else. So I think it helped me to be like, Okay, it's in my blood, and I really want to make things. 

MOHAMMADI: I wanted to dig into the phrase ‘displaced timeline’ in your bio. In the press release, Synonym was “aiming to transcend sequential timelines.” Could you elaborate on the relationship to time in your work?

WILLIAMS: I think that touches on that collage aspect that I was talking about before. A good example would be, I made this painting last year. I was walking the dog to the dog park, and I had this moment. There's this red fence and there's snow everywhere. And I feel like a newborn giraffe walking in the snow. I'm also like, “Whoa, snow.” All the time. Jade's like, “Who cares? It's annoying.” But I had this moment of me walking through the snow, thinking about Oswaldo, my grandpa. He died never seeing snow. Oswaldo Died Never Seeing Snow was the title of the painting. I painted this big red fence with the snow, and then I painted my grandpa on the horse in the snow because it's like these two timelines. This guy's dead, long gone, and he would have never experienced snow because he came from Alexandria to Australia. He would have never had this human experience that I'm having right now. And the horse, because he was similar to the guy with the goat. That's why I think I really sort of meshed with that story, because he had a horse in a tiny backyard in Melbourne. He was like, "Well, fuck. I can have a horse. We could have him in Alexandria. I want to have a horse.” He'd walk his horse around. The council came in and made him get rid of it. I just like the idea of him in my timeline, the present time, walking past this thing.

Synonym is on view through March 9th at Roberts Projects LA, 442 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles.

Hybrid Forms: An Interview Of Artist & Storyteller Christopher Myers

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

interview by Summer Bowie

How does a country like Vietnam, absent of a black community, develop a rich brass band tradition with roots in the American South? How did the British flag inspire a Ghanaian tradition in textiles that is steeped in magical superstition? What do Aimé Césaire, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Emma Goldman all have in common? To find the answers to any of these questions you’d have to ask none other than the multi-disciplinary, head honcho of hybridity, artist Christopher Myers. His practice is as much about connecting the mythologies of ancient Egypt and Greece with those of Judeo-Christian scripture, as it is about connecting the migrations of syncratic practices across the globe and throughout history. His most recent solo exhibition, Drapetomania, at Fort Gansevoort in Los Angeles primarily features hand-sewn flags depicting a wide array of syncratic allegories that in many ways define the globalized, contemporary psyche. These are the mythologies that form the foundation of our collective truth (though we know them to be fiction), and the forgotten legacies that have silently burrowed themselves deep into our cultural fabric. These narratives that inform us and define us find their way to us via oral traditions, dramatic performance, visual art and the printed page, and within all of these disciplines you will find Christopher Myers, obsessively studying the origins of every fiber, the intricacies of every pattern, and the channels of commerce that facilitate it all.

SUMMER BOWIE: Your new show, Drapetomania, at Fort Gansevoort LA features primarily quilted tapestries fabricated in Luxor, Egypt. How did you find these artisans, and why textiles?

CHRISTOPHER MYERS: I was doing research for theater design. I worked with a collaborator, Kaneza Schaal, on a piece about the Egyptian Book of the Dead in 2014. And as part of the research for that book, I went to the Valley of the Kings in Luxor, Egypt. That trip was a gift of a trip. Luxor is a place that has been alive for generations and generations with culture, with religion, with spirituality, with all of the things that we all care about and love. And, while I was there, I ran into these fabric workers who work in the tourist trade. Because, the language that I speak most fluently is the language of speaking to other artists about making things, we quickly got into those conversations: what is the work you’re making, the years of training that go into hands that can sew so deftly, and the ways in which the tourist works aren’t really satisfying to them. So, we started to work together on work that is basic craft, but can speak to not only the traditions that I come from—traditions that are often relegated to poor people, or to women, or to people of color—but also to the other history that I’ve now encountered: from contemporary thinking and performance art, to work in other countries that I think this work is in dialogue with. 

I’m thinking especially of Asafo flags, which are a hybrid form in Ghana. The Ghanaian people, when they were colonized by the British, they saw the British parading with their flags and they saw these flags as a kind of magic that was used to exert power over them, and they thought, “we know how to make this magic. We can sew our own.” So, they made flags for parading, for teaching about their own specific identities. And, I love all of that work. Work that takes what the West has given us and then transforms it into art that speaks to the entire world.

BOWIE: In regard to those identities, it seems like you explore a lot of narratives and mythologies that are shared between several different cultures. So, a lot of the stories you are telling with these flags are stories that your fabricators are already familiar with as well. This is such a shared language.

MYERS: Absolutely. If you travel to places in which the pathways of tourism are less trod, you’ll find that the things that overlap in the venn diagrams of our identities end up being these larger myths, these bigger stories about what it means to be human, about ways of talking, about our relationship with the Divine, or our relationship with nature, or our relationship with the mass of humanity, and I think those are the overlaps that I’m particularly interested in. If you grow up like me: Catholic, but super involved in some super syncratic practices, you realize there’s a relationship between a god like Horus in ancient Egypt and the baby Jesus. I’m interested in the syncratic impulse and the mixing of mythologies.

BOWIE: Your sculptures explore the roles that men of African origins have played at various points in history. Can you talk a bit about the generational lineage and its relationship to labor and bondage that you’re referencing in these pieces?

MYERS: One of the things is that there are obviously syncratic impulses that people understand. You see images of God across cultures. But then, there are ways in which our cultural migration, our cultural instinct shows itself. So much of the iron work of the Old South was derivative of the West African iron workers who were forced to migrate here and were enslaved as highly skilled labor in the States. So, the techniques of iron work—the patterning of the wrought iron rails of New Orleans that we associate with upper class housing—are actually patterns that are borrowed from West Africa. I’m interested in those cultural mixings. For example, a collar that is filled with candles; I think a lot about the idea that so many of the people who were actually making shackles during the slavery period in the United States were West African imports. Black people who did the labor of building shackles—we were forced to build shackles for our brothers and sisters. I’m also fascinated by the idea that we did that, but there had to be moments of resistance, even if they were just symbolic. Moments of telling another story, and that is what’s most exciting. Similarly, I’m always interested in the way that no change is ever simple. No bondage is ever without complication.  

Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort

BOWIE: The rat cage mask—with its reference to vaudevillian sideshows, the bondage of both the human and animal performers involved—it feels like it really calls into question the opportunity for resistance. 

MYERS: And what’s interesting to me is that those stories are complicated, always. The 1980s were some of the last vestiges of that kind of performance. There was a guy who had some kind of bone deficiency in which his limbs were severely compromised, and he displayed himself as The Frog Man throughout Texas, and at some point a human rights group got wind of this and sponsored a very strident protest to this practice—without ever having consulted the guy. And the guy said, “If it hadn’t been for my life as a performer, I would still be selling pencils from a moving cart in Texas, but instead I’ve seen the world.” And, I think that we have to look at all of these stories and complicate them. To understand that nobody is that perfect victim that we want them to be. 

BOWIE: You started illustrating your father’s children’s books in the ‘90s. Did you initially learn the art of storytelling through him?

MYERS: My first storytelling coach would’ve been my grandfather, who didn’t read a word of English, but was the best storyteller that I’ve ever known. He didn’t read at all, he didn’t read a word of English, he didn’t read anything but he was a great storyteller. That is part of what I mean by coming from a tradition of artists, makers, and creators who may not be recognized by any kind of mainstream world. Of course, my father was a writer. Him being a writer, he was taking some of those things he learned from his father and translating them into a form that could be read, that was legible to others as an art form. But make no mistake, we were all very clear that the chief storyteller in my family was my grandfather, and that we’ve all just been trickling down from his talents.

BOWIE: You pull references from all over the world and across time. Your wide array of disciplines is just as disparate. Is there a common thread at all?

MYERS: I love making things. I have a slight addiction, maybe it’s a problem, I’m sure it would be diagnosable if someone had a word for it. I believe that stories really do change the world. Today, I was in a classroom in Queens, a place called Central Queens Academy Charter School. In that room, 50 or 60 children whose families have come from all over the world, from Tibet, Nepal, Dominican Republic, the Philippines, and China, and every one of them is a hero, they are their own Odysseus. I live in this world in which there are stories around me, there are stories that can change the world, and my job is to find the form, and to usher these stories into the world in a kind of public way. At this moment, I’m preparing for a play that will be produced off Broadway next week that I’ve written about migrations, Cartography. It’s a theater piece for young people thinking about the challenges of migration. The thing that is central is this idea of trying to fight the tide of forgetting that is so often imposed on all of our stories of migration. 

BOWIE: In 2016, you presented work alongside Pollock, Warhol and Billie Holiday at Cooper Gallery in a show that explored the intersection between jazz music and visual art. Can you talk about the genesis of that piece?

MYERS: I think that one of the things that is interesting about being African American is the idea that we are some of the original hybridized people. We are some of the first people in the world to kind of have defined identities on that hyphen between two cultures. And jazz is absolutely the central exemplar of that hybridity of mixing European instruments with tonal patterns and rhythms that are from the continent. That being said, that specific set of pieces is a piece that was born in Vietnam. 

So, I was living in Vietnam, and early in the morning you hear jazz music kind of wandering through the streets. Like, yo man, where’s this jazz music coming up to my apartment from the street? I ran outside and what I found was a brass band tradition that intersected with other brass band traditions like New Orleans jazz, but it’s used for funerals. So, in the morning you see all these funeral marches and jazz bands, and there were moments of  recognition because the form is so indebted to African Americans. So, I began to make a series of uniforms and instruments for this funeral march that would go from Saigon to New Orleans. What was shown at the Cooper Gallery was a piece of that series of instruments that I built with instrument makers that were from Vietnam. It was subsequently made into a film via my friends who were called The Propeller Group, a Vietnamese-American art collective. We were very excited to take this work that is centered on levels and levels of hybridity and cultural movement, and to literalize some of that hybridity, to make almost mythical beings of the instruments, chimera and hydra of trumpets, French horns, and cymbals. That was the center of that piece. And, for real, I think that when you look at so much of the work that we love, it comes from cultural collision.

BOWIE: How exactly did jazz make its way to Vietnam if there’s not a black community existing there?

MYERS: Right, that would be an obvious question for me. What I found was that it comes from the French. James Reese Europe was an African-American bandleader for the military during World War I. He brought jazz to Europe, he brought it specifically to France, so the French took up this brass band tradition in their colonization of Vietnam, who then picked up this tradition that’s been handed down, and handed down, and handed down. What was fascinating was asking the musicians in Vietnam, “Where did you get this tradition from?” And they said, “We don’t know!” This is what I’m talking about in terms of the currency of forgetting, the tide of forgetting, and I’m hoping in some small way can help to stem that tide. 

 
 

BOWIE: How did your appreciation for Vaslav Nijinsky come about?

MYERS: I’m interested in histories of colonialism. So, Nijinsky as a young Polish talent was taken up into the Russian system and his kind of cultural mix, having been colonized. There’s this thing called drain theory that happens as a result of colonial powers. They take the great talents from the people they are colonizing, and those people become these hybrid figures, people like Nijinsky or Aimé Césaire, or Senghor. So many great poets and intellectual figures are hybrid figures that have been educated in the West, but have come back home and tried to find ways to resurrect their own traditions. Nijinsky is so different, especially because at some point he kind of succumbs to the mental stress and was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was thirty, and never danced again after having revolutionized the world of dance. But, when you read his journal—he kept a meticulous journal—for six weeks just as he was turning the corner of mental health, and when you read that journal you can see how so much of what was affecting him were the cultural pressures of his time; the split and hybridized identity. At one point he writes, “I’m a Negro. I’m a Chinese. I’m a Red Indian. I’m a White.” And he has kind of lost himself, and lost his own sense of his identity. Not only the colonial experience he’s undergoing, but also the ways in which he is replicating the colonial gaze as a dancer. He also dances as other ethnicities. He dances as a Thai, or as an Indian, and that kind of hybridity, and revealing in his journals was and continues to be very inspiring to me.

BOWIE: Do you think the art world would dance more [socially] if they worked more with dancers?

MYERS: Well, the first thing I would like to say is I very much appreciate your recognition that the art world is abysmal when it comes to dance. So, I think that firstly, the art world has some of the worst parties because of this dance aversion. And I also feel like the art world needs to start to back up their imagination of themselves as being global by getting out of their houses, and I mean that both metaphorically and literally. More and more they’re realizing you see the same people in seven cities. I’m not particularly interested in that party. I wish that more of them would come to some of the events that I continually gather. I’m interested in experiencing things and places that could touch you and change the way you see the world. Hopefully, that’s what the work is doing too.

Drapetomania is on view through February 8 at Fort Gansevoort Los Angeles, 4859 Fountain Avenue. Follow Christopher Myers on Instagram @kalyban