**This title is on pre-order. Ships late spring 2025.
Hardcover, 146 pages
10.5 in. x 8.25 in. | 26.67 cm. x 20.955 cm.
Senon Williams is a lifelong musician, visual artist and poet, born and currently based in Los Angeles. Descended from survivors of enslavement and the Holocaust, Williams is an artist whose practice is a response to scarcity and loss with a deep commitment to preservation. He is drawn to the physical scraps of life—and the layering of those scraps into a larger tapestry—and believes that these objects have souls. Assembling found pieces, large and small, sometimes literally from yards or the street, Williams collects unwanted things, used things, to create anew. A blending of the objects’ inner character with his own vision into an assemblage, not only of the physical but also of the spirit.
Williams’ work is grounded with a love of language play, sounds, textures, and associations of word and object. Working in various media in his visual art practice—sculpture, painting, serigraph and printmaking—Williams counters what we think we know. Something familiar gives us pause and words we know well induce questions. Always blending the visual with poetry, we are addressed with layers of contrasts.
This book forms a graveyard or a scrapyard of items one might typically discard. In our time of extreme wastefulness, assembling the detritus from his art making into a scrapbook gives each of these items a collective home and value. Gathered from his day-to-day studio practice, they are thoughts jotted down, remnants of materials used, random receipts, which suggest a sense of care, like acts of preservation, mending and repurposing. Each piece is held, suspended from its final dissolution, forming a new place in which to exist.
Interspersed within are vignettes looking at the histories of scrapbooking and ephemeral collection over time by Richelle Munkhoff and Beth Ann Whittaker of Plain Sight Archive. There is a long legacy and history of this artistic action and this publication represents now another documentation of time and place.
