Peter Williams. Juried Artist
Constellations
WebXR on the Styly platform
Artist Statement
Immemorial is a decolonial virtual environment interpreting my personal experiences growing up near and learning about Ipperwash Beach, Ontario Canada throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Ipperwash is a sacred site belonging to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation. It is geologically significant in that it contains spherical rock formations known as kettles that seem to hover in the vast expanse of Lake Huron. In the early twentieth century, the area was appropriated by the Canadian government for use as a military base. In 1997, a peaceful protest by members the local First Nations community became a tragedy when RCMP officers shot and killed one of the protesters, 38-year-old Dudley George. Ten years later, on December 20, 2007, the Ontario government turned over the land to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation. The scale and enormity of violent injustice inflicted upon Indigenous peoples by White, colonial governments here and around the world will never be fully uncovered or understood.
The news reports and written accounts that shout with finality will be subsumed in the silence of this beautiful, complex place. It is a place that I can only interpret in this fragmentary, incomplete form: one of a constant present, and present simultaneity.
Styly link: Immemorial
About the artists
Peter Williams is a hybrid media artist originally from Canada, and currently Associate Professor of New Media Art at California State University Sacramento, California. Specializing in generative and interactive art, he makes tactically unstable works that meet, avert and translate the gaze. Contemporary media are elastic and chimerical; more and more resembling us. Through his art, Williams struggles with this ever-deepening recursion. Williams’ works have been exhibited internationally, including at 3331 Arts Chiyoda (Japan), ACM Eurographics (Italy), ACM HCI (Conference on Human Computer Interaction, Canada), ACM SIGGRAPH Asia (Japan, Thailand), Hong Kong Visual Arts Centre, ISEA (Japan, Estonia, Singapore, Canada), The Lumen Prize Exhibition (UK, Greece, USA), Skolska28 (Czech Republic), The University of Edinburgh (Scotland), and xCoAx (Spain).
Credits: Peter Williams