Softcore: work by Kate Williams private view

About

Kate Williams’ work explores artifice and illusion, and the eerie yet pleasurable sense of estrangement they can provoke.

This solo show Softcore interrogates comfort: its capacity to soothe and seduce, but also to suffocate.

The series Soft Cell examines the allure of giving up our agency in return for a kind of weightlessness, and asks what we risk when we seek an an anaesthetic against postmodern culture. New work Softcore explores similar territory in relation to bodily sensation and visual stimulation: what is at stake when we consume to be consumed, or escape into pornotopia?

In ‘Pool’, imaginary architectural forms cast high-key shadows in vivid, empty landscapes, as if Di Chirico found 1980s Miami. The series draws upon the conceits of postmodern architecture and the trompe l'oeil fantasies of the 18th century in playful, dreamlike, mildly unsettling scenes.