Here’s a fun game: Browse the digital images of a show, specifically a show of art with an intriguing materials list. The list says, “This art has layers, textures and different finishes.” The images say, “This art is flat.” Fix those images in your memory, in their two-dimensional, pixel-generated state, their scale shrunk by the size of your screen. Then visit them in real life, and thrill to the feeling of complete misunderstanding. Stand in front of something you once thought of as having really no size at all, which now stretches over eight-and-a-half-feet wide. Understand the order of operations, the steps that went into making this surface not a slick, easily reproducible thing, but an object of tangible, visible labor.
Siklon, Didier William’s first solo show at Altman Siegel, draws from the artist’s experience of growing up in Miami after immigrating with his family from Port-au-Prince, Haiti as a child. It is one of those “stand back, take it in, get close, marvel some more” experiences. Accordingly, this is a “you really have to see these in person” plea.
