Lara Williams is a visual artist living and working in Iowa City, Iowa. She received her BFA from the University of Iowa and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
I make paintings about time, data recollection, and consideration of space, exploring how spaciality and repetition move back and forth through time, and memory. The paintings vacillate between abstraction and representation, using architectural and repeated forms to work through personal narratives in tandem with science fiction tropes. The grid is a marker or placeholder for time, the individual squares acting as moments of personal history and memory, and suggesting a recollection of deep time.
Informed by shared dreams with my twin sister and my upbringing with my grandma, I am always thinking about perception vs reality in my memories, as well as awkward, uncomfortable questions and feelings that you go through when you’re little and learn something that your brain can’t really comprehend yet, like death, or the age of the universe.
Lara Williams
lararaewilliams@gmail.com
lwilli21@artic.edu
Education
MFA School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL, 2023
Post Baccalaureate School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 2021
B.F.A University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 2016
Exhibitions
2021 - Post Baccalaureate Group Show, SAIC Gallery, Chicago, IL
2019 - Refractions and Planes, CSPS Hall, Cedar Rapids, IA
2019 - Interwoven//Vanitas, group show, Iowa City, IA
2019 - Public Space One Artist in Residence closing reception, Iowa City, IA
2018 - Slow Swim, exhibition at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Iowa City, IA
2018 - Slow Swim, duo exhibition, Deadwood Gallery, Iowa City, IA 2016 - BFA exhibition, University of Iowa , Iowa City, IA
Curatorial Work:
2019 - Interwoven//Vanitas, group show, Iowa City, IA
2018 - Slow Swim, Deadwood Gallery, Iowa City, IA
2017 - The Puerto Rico Benefit Exhibition, RADinc, Iowa City, IA