Brittney Leeanne Williams: The Form in Which the Spirit Dresses

The Form in Which the Spirit Dresses continues Williams’s interest in the notion of theophany—the visible manifestation of deities. Many compositions take inspiration from the artist’s research and references of biblical genre paintings, that depict angelic apparitions wrestling, conversing, or engaging human beings. In these narratives angels are archetypal forms—guards, messengers, and bearers of symbols. The human character is often rewarded for struggling with the angel or heeding its message. Williams also draws on ideas of angels as dialogic or instructional partners embodied in texts such as Talking With Angels by Gitta Mallasz (published 1979), from which the show’s title is drawn. For Williams, angelic visitation becomes a metaphor for intense feelings of disconnection from revelation or creative power—also known as artist’s block. The paintings explore exalted emotions, attainment of wisdom, and the struggle to comprehend the world beyond what is in front of our eyes.

Entangled and ethereal, the bodies of the angel figures are redacted, revealing traces of their presence through billowy clothes and curling fabrics in rich reds and ultramarine. Rather than these revelators appearing embodied and human, the angelic figure is absent, suggested by their vacated robes. Centralizing the drapery, Williams underscores the tension between the seen and unseen. Here, angels are imagination, mystery, and inspiration personified. The divine messengers suggested in these works have been refigured or even disfigured. They are stripped of mass, weight, and density; of message or intent. Only their enveloping presence remains. The title of some works refer to these encounters as “interruptions;” visually, this is represented by the subjects breaking through or beyond William’s geometric framing devices. 

Some of the works operate like talismans, icons seeking balance in conflicts of doubt and faith. In these paintings, both doubt and belief coexist and predicate each other compositionally. Without these redacted figures, the draperies would be formless; their dramatic poses and shapes are defined by the contradiction that something there isn’t there; isn’t visible, comprehendible, or knowable. These works meditate on embracing doubt, forging on in periods of uncertainty, without abandoning hope for a spiritual presence or encounter. With works like 100 Points, the image of an eye appears, projecting out from a praying figure. In others, the dual eye-figure emits a conical beam of light composed from stippled pink, red, green, and blue brushstrokes, expressing merging energy, a contact point with the mystical. Submissive, yet entreating, this kneeling form becomes the source of vision, a contemplative gesture that suggests seeing while being seen. The angel has gone, but the eye is present. 

— Adapted from Brittney Leeanne Williams’s artist statement