The Mysterious Distance Between Men Of Means
STATEMENT/BIO
Jed Williams was born in Philadelphia, Pa., U.S.A in 1975 and raised in Paris, France. He is a French and American dual citizen currently based in the city of his birth. He is the son of famed Pulitzer Prize winning poet C.K. Williams, who is currently teaching creative writing at Princeton University. Jed graduated from the University of the Arts (BFA in Painting and Drawing, 2000) and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Certificate in Painting, 2005), both located in Philadelphia, and has been exhibiting his work in various venues ever since.
Jed works on his images in different kinds of media: oil paint, acrylic, mixed media; his art stems from a wish to blend a more formalist, expressionistic abstract tradition with a conceptual quest nourished by his interest in the human figure, pop and mythological culture, and different forms of spirituality.
We Have Ways Of Making You Smile
The images Jed makes simultaneously stem from intense inner turmoil and wonder expressing itself in his fascination with certain objects, images and symbols, which he observes and works from. The objects, images and symbols he chooses to work from possess “loaded” meanings as well as symbolic societal and cultural connotations. He is juxtaposing and associating ciphers of meaning by physically bringing these objects, images and symbols together in seemingly illogical yet intellectually and culturally relevant ways, all the while creating his own personal semi-abstract painting style.
I Speak To Me
C.K. sent us a poem that applies to Jed’s paintings. It was published in the New Yorker and will be reprinted in his new book “Wait,” this Spring.
THE FOUNDATION by C.K. Williams
1.
Watch me, I’m running, watch me, I’m dancing, I’m air;
the building I used to live in has been razed and I’m skipping,
hopping, two-footedly leaping across the blocks, bricks,
slabs of concrete, plaster and other unnamable junk…
Or nameable, really, if you look at the wreckage closely…
Here, for instance, this shattered I-beam is the Bible,
and this chunk of mortar? Plato, the mortar of mind,
also in pieces, in pieces in me, anyway, in my mind…
Aristotle and Nietzsche, Freud and Camus and Buber,
and Christ, even, that year of reading “Paradise Lost,”
when I thought, Hell, why not? but that fractured, too…
Kierkegaard, Hegel, and Kant, and Goffman and Marx,
all heaped in the foundation, and I’ve sped through so often
that now I have it by heart, can run, dance, be air,
not think of the spew of intellectual dust I scuffed up
when in my barely broken-in boots I first clumped through
the sanctums of Buddhism, Taoism, Zen, and the Areopagite,
even, whose entire text I typed out—my god, why?—
I didn’t care, I just kept bumping my head on the lintels,
Einstein, the Gnostics, Kabbalah, Saint This and Saint That…
2.
Watch me again now, because I’m not alone in my dancing,
my being air, I’m with my poets, my Rilke, my Yeats,
we’re leaping together through the debris, a jumble of wrack,
but my Keats floats across it, my Herbert and Donne,
my Kinnell, my Bishop and Blake are soaring across it,
my Frost, Baudelaire, my Dickinson, Lowell and Larkin,
and my giants, my Whitman, my Shakespeare, my Dante
and Homer; they were the steel, though scouring as I was
the savants and sages half the time I hardly knew it…
But Vallejo was there all along , and my Sidney and Shelley,
my Coleridge and Hopkins, there all along with their music,
which is why I can whirl through the rubble of everything else,
the philosophizing and theories, the thesis and anti- and syn-,
all I believed must be what meanings were made of,
when really it was the singing, the choiring, the cadence,
the lull of the vowels, the chromatical consonant clatter…
Watch me again, I haven’t landed, I’m hovering here
over the fragments, the remnants, the splinters and shards;
my poets are with me, my soarers, my skimmers, my skaters,
aloft on their song in the ruins, their jubilant song of the ruins.
Greetings From Home Planet
Faltering Onlooker
Trapped Radiance
