Michelle Williams Gamaker

Michelle Williams Gamaker examines the potential of storytelling in her subtle and performative renderings of the everyday. Her practice includes performance, installation, video and photography, in which fiction, documentary and theory are often daringly woven together. Gamaker seeks out alternative yet recognizable spaces, which create frames for complex reflections over ideas of experience, the sensory relationship between the body and the spatial environment and the relationship between bodies and objects. Her work often evokes notions of sublime states of being inserted into a quotidian context, exemplified through figures such as the medium or the healer. In the video Sunday Afternoon (2001), the artist is seen lying on the floor while her greyhound dog licks and touches her, its legs at first glance resembling an old man's bony limbs. With its slow pace, the video plays with the uncertain identity of the figures in the grainy, anthropomorphising image. Over a short span of time, the fragmented bodies seem to engage in a gentle, almost erotic entanglement, mixing a physical, almost inhuman intensity with a domestic allure.