Artist Talk with Stephanie J. Williams

In this artist talk, former Artist-in-Residence Stephanie J. Williams will discuss and provide insight into her solo exhibition The Pleasure of Wasted Time, on view at The Nicholson Project from September 10th through November 4th.

“Animating stop-motion puppets is perhaps the most inefficient way to make my work. It demands my slowness,” says Williams. The Pleasure of Wasted Time reflects on this slowness and the importance of the care that comes with creating stop-motion films. The exhibition features a series of Williams’ stop motion short films along with an installation of the hand-built puppets, sculptures, and set pieces used in the creation of these films.

Stephanie J. Williams is a tinkerer and doodler. Her work primarily navigates hierarchies of taste, unpacking how “official” histories are constructed in order to understand contemporary social coding. She received her MFA in Sculpture from RISD under a Presidential Scholarship, has shown in Fictions, part of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s F-show exhibitions, as well as with Washington Project for the Arts, Lawrence University, the Delaware Contemporary, and the Walters Museum as a Sondheim Finalist, with residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo, Sculpture Space, Williams College, the Nicholson Project, VCCA, and ACRE. Recent projects have screened at the New Orleans Film Festival (Best Animated Short, 2022), Sweaty Eyeballs Animation Festival (Jury Citation, 2022), the Atlanta Film Festival (2023), and Outfest LA LGBTQIA+ Film Festival (2023). She has received support from the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund in Media Studies at Johns Hopkins University and multiple DC Commission on the Arts & Humanities Fellowships. She is based in DC/Baltimore and currently teaches stop motion as Full Time Faculty for Maryland Institute College of Art. For more information, visit www.stephaniejwilliams.com.

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Event Venue & Nearby Stays

The Nicholson Project, 2310 Nicholson Street Southeast, Washington, United States