Contact High
D’Angelo Lovell Williams
MACK
English
Hardcover
104 Pages
230 x 275 mm
2022
ISBN 9781913620622
Both an artist’s book and comprehensive inquisition of D’Angelo Lovell Williams’s work to date, Contact High offers an expansive engagement with the visualisation of desire and depiction of the Black body. Williams’s narrative images reflect the many forms in which Black queer people exist and have existed historically within each other’s lives, picturing them as sitters, lovers, caregivers, or shadows. Williams’s work is guided by their life experience and an interrogation of their own perspective, as well as wider questions around the representation of race, class, sexuality, gender, and intimacy. The title Contact High references the importance of touch and gesture in Williams‘s work, and alludes to heightened senses and intuitive movement.
From self-portraits to collaborations with community, Williams’s photographs visualise the Black body in performative scenes that are theatrical, dance-like, and occasionally mundane, pointing towards collective histories and Black ancestral practices. At the heart of these intimate, dialogic images are notions of kinship and spirituality interweaved with quietly political and radical gestures. Williams’s unfaltering gaze insists on visibility and deference, and creates scenes in which Black and queer voices are the authority. The dynamics that play out between families, cultures, friends, lovers, ancestors and descendants are visualised as a spectrum of care, tenderness, and vulnerability, speaking to the nuances of our complex lives often overlooked by historical depictions.
(source: https://www.mackbooks.us/products/contact-high-br-d-angelo-lovell-williams)
About the Artist
D’Angelo Lovell Williams (b. 1992, Jackson, Mississippi) is a Black, HIV-positive artist expanding narratives of Black and queer intimacy through photography. They earned their BFA in photography from Memphis College of Art in 2015, an MFA in photography from Syracuse University in 2018, and are a 2018 Skowhegan School of Art alum. They live and work in New York City. D’Angelo Lovell Williams has had four solo exhibitions with Higher Pictures in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020. The 2020 exhibition, Papa Don’t Preach, was presented in collaboration with Janice Guy at her gallery in Harlem.
dangelolovellwilliams.com
(source: https://higherpictures.com/artists/dangelo-lovell-williams-2/)
About the Publisher
MACK is an independent art and photography publishing house based in London. Mack works with established and emerging artists, writers and curators, and cultural institutions, releasing between 20-25 books per year. The publisher was founded in 2010 in London by Michael Mack.
mackbooks.co.uk
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/pages/about-us)
