Kandis Williams - Triadic Ballet still

Kandis Williams
Triadic Ballet still, 2021
Eleven-color screenprint on Ebony Colorplan paper
13 x 19 inches (33 x 48.3 cm)
Framed: 16 x 21 3/4 x 1 5/8 inches (40.6 x 55.2 x 4.1 cm)
Edition of 38, 3 AP

Printed by Du-Good Press, New York
Published by 52 Walker

The versatile practice of Los Angeles–based artist Kandis Williams (b. 1985) spans collage, performance, video, assemblage, and installation, interrogating issues of race, nationalism, authority, and eroticism.

The present print relates to the artist’s film Triadic Ballet (2021) that was produced while Williams was in residence in New York for her solo presentation, A Line, the inaugural exhibition for 52 Walker in 2021. Recasting history to evade hegemonic frameworks, Williams sought to make visible the inexpressible violence to which Black bodies have been subject in dance and beyond. Her film, which takes its title from Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 Triadisches Ballett (Triadic Ballet), features Natasha Diamond-Walker, a soloist with the Martha Graham Dance Company, who is choreographed by Williams. In the screenprint, three characters portrayed by Diamond-Walker are presented in the center of the composition. The figures are rendered in bright red, yellow, and blue, referencing the “triadic” scheme of color theory, a palette comprising three hues evenly spaced on the color wheel, as well as Schlemmer's ballet.