Cool Cleveland | Thomas Mulready  |  November 17, 2012

Cool Cleveland: Jeff Williams at SPACES

Five spontaneous videos in five hours?

Between the hours of six and eleven PM on the evening of November 16, 2012, Cool Cleveland visited five creative hotspots and spoke with five of Cleveland's most interesting people.

This was stop number two:
Jeff Williams at SPACES

Born in Cambridge, educated in the Midwest, Jeff Williams works in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at the University of Texas in Austin. But on Fri 11/16/12, he became an honorary Clevelander, when Cool Cleveland pulled him aside at the opening of his new show, "9 week interval (Al/Bi/C/Ga/Fe/Na)" at SPACES. Watch the video here.

Because of his obsession with industrial metals and how they react over time, his aesthetic certainly mirrors the concerns of many Cleveland artists.

The iconic "Column" is two massive 20′ structural steel beams bolted around the central column in SPACES' largest gallery, tightened down until the beams cinch together. The artist plans to return during the 9-week run of the exhibition to tighten it even more.

The work, "Untitled," is a 22 gauge sheet of cold pressed steel, rolled into a cylinder, then clamped together. It appears static, but the clamping is squeezing the steel constantly.

The small "Alusion" on the wall is a most bizarre extruded aluminum foam which he took over to the Cleveland Institute of Art and torched it, melted the foam and ran it through an electrostatic process which caused it to attract fibers.

Finally, "Al/Ga" places small bubbles of gallium, which slowly compromises one aluminum I-beam, on top of another I-beam perfectly preserved in a plexiglass vetrine, with a rotating third I-beam projected onto it.

Original Article

Sign Up Never miss our goings-on. Sign up for our email.

Share This

Photo Gallery

1 of 22