Palo Gallery is pleased to announce Life in Ellipsis by Sandy Williams IV. The artist's inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery features six new works that embrace and elaborate on the nuances of time. Please join Palo Gallery and Sandy Williams IV for a celebratory opening reception on Friday, 28 February 2025, from 6 PM to 8 PM at 21 East 3rd Street in New York.
On Life in Ellipsis, Williams IV writes:
An ellipsis is a pause, a breath, an omission, a world between ideas... We use ellipses when writing to denote time and absence, while simultaneously implying additional meanings amongst a text's unmarked spaces and margins. To describe Black and marginalized experiences within majority cultures as ‘life in ellipsis’ is to characterize the amorphous shift of our bodies through time, through description, and through public and private spaces. Our collective ellipsis is the length of that moment, the short seconds between our ‘self’ and our ‘identity’, as personhood collides with the demands of being seen.
This exhibition explores the dynamics of time as fluid links between national and global narratives, familial histories, socio-carceral systems, and interpersonal relationships. The combined works of the exhibition emphasize the historical as a present force that frames our contemporary conditions and relationships to one another – an ever-shifting, collective memory and experience of time.
Life in Ellipsis will feature the ‘Time Ruler’ series, in which Williams presents objects that measure the duration of a single second at a speed of one mile per hour (i.e. when moving at one mile per hour, a distance of 17.6 inches can be traversed in one second. At 17.6 inches, each ruler is therefore 1 second long).
00:10 (To Remember the Murder of Eric Garner) is composed of ten bronze ‘Time Rulers’ commemorating Eric Garner. On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner was murdered by an NYPD officer after the latter held him in a prohibited chokehold for 10 seconds. He was pronounced dead an hour later, and no officers were ever charged with his murder. This installation of ten bronze Time Rulers holds the weight and time of this tragedy as a memorial in our collective conscience.
Life in Ellipsis holds time as present and insists on our collective responsibility to recognize, remember, and reflect on the significance of specific 'times' within our shared social conscience.
