NEW YORK, NY.- Kate Werble Gallery is presenting the gallery’s first exhibition with Jeff Williams, Electro Slag.

Williams’ installation of new sculptures merges the animal and mineral through hand cast elements, recycled slag, industrial extrusions, and human made fossils. Subjecting his materials to transformations in the studio, Williams uses a range of physical processes such as crushing, fusing, crumpling and chopping. They are man-made stalactites and stalagmites, extending down from the ceiling on mesh grips or stretching up from the floor on melted beams.

The works in Electro Slag are based on Williams’ exploration of the material evidence left by ecological processes from geological and biological phenomena found in Central Texas. The impressions he captures are from two proximate sites: the destructive soil disturbances created by feral hogs, an invasive hybrid species who dig up along the riverbanks searching for food, and an exposed cave whose formations quietly record shifts in precipitation across millennia. The two sites operate on vastly different scales; functioning as parallel indices of time and place. One location is rapidly altered by the behavior of a recently developed species and the other is slowly inscribed through patient geological accumulation.

Williams plays with shifts in perception of materials and forms to question the nature of physical experience. He renders the organic inorganic, a material transformation that nods to the original intention of sculpture to capture the living.

Jeff Williams (US, born 1976 in Cambridge, MA) received his BFA in 1998 from Columbus College of Art and Design (Columbus, OH) and his MFA in 2001 from Syracuse University, (Syracuse, NY). He was the 2009 Leonore Annenberg Fellow in the Arts at the American Academy in Rome. Williams has also been awarded residencies at the Dora Maar House, Menerbes, France; Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, CA; Recess in New York, NY; Galería Perdida, Chilchota, Michoacán, Mexico; and the Core Program in Houston, TX. Williams is a recipient of an NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship for Environmental Structures and a Santo Foundation Award. Solo exhibitions include Jack Hanley Gallery, New York, NY; Co-Lab Projects, Austin, TX; RAIR in Philadelphia, PA; Arthouse in Austin, TX: and Artpace, San Antonio, TX. Group exhibitions include the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Houston, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit, MI; and Pearlstein Gallery, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA. Williams lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and Austin, TX.