Lisa Williamson mediates the relationship between material and abstracted languages at conversation in our realities. She envisions the space her work exists in as a stage for human curiosity at its best, dialoguing our sincerest contemplations of the body, of natural materials, of architecture, and of an endlessness of varying shapes taking their place. Designed at human scale, our experience of each piece engages the senses, challenging the limitations of the human mind.

I walk with Williamson across her show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Hollywood on a midmorning in late September. It's a clean kind of morning--bright and cool; the bony angles of the gallery space punctuated by her woody, granular work. She gestures around the room. "It's like a sentence," she says of Hover Land Lover. "I want it to read like a sentence."

We begin at “Plateaus” (2024), which demonstrates Williamson's meticulous appreciation for detail. A kinetic bronze richly coats raised plates, taking on the light of the space throughout the day in stillness and in motion. These tectonic arrangements embrace intentional aberrations running along the sides, displaying the natural ridges and cut of the wood. Williamson establishes a visual language for the intuitive visceral reactions to our surroundings, vignetting the passing ephemera of life and sensuality. Because of this, each designated room in the gallery is much like traveling through an aquarium or a tunnel or a gateway to a higher, more spiritual plane. “Pool” (2024) takes on a concave shape of water, illustrating the reactiveness to the space, shifting and expanding our capacity to perceive and receive from the imagery before us. We traverse different planes of view in this space, looking toward the future.

In the main showroom, we are transported to a scene of abstract and representational imagery in equilibrium. Clean, sharp edges invite the viewer closer in “Chimera” (2024) and “Band” (2024), bouncing off of one another’s sensibilities–Chimera’s for imagining vastness inside a binary of depth, Band’s for its precision of shape and color. Williamson’s exhibition meditates on our capacity to watch these forms take shape, to bathe in their nuances. They push human imagination forward, push it to engage with each meaningful moment we spend under the radiating gaze of the pieces, hoping to find something truthful about the human experience. And perhaps it is just that, to experience and absorb all that makes us better and smarter. We find ourselves in conversation with the pieces, eye-level with us, reaching out to teach us its visual language. Each life of each piece in the gallery considers the space democratically. This practice is a new way of observation for its viewer, but most certainly born from a practice of regard for spatiality. This regard subconsciously maintains our engagement, taking us along to decode the sentence of the exhibition Williamson puts before us.

Toward the end of our journey through the exhibition, Williamson offers us a finality and experimentation of knowledge-making in her diegesis. She toggles on and off elements of representational works balanced among abstracted works in pieces like “Speaker” (2024), where we fundamentally contend with and absorb our sensory reality. Much of this exhibition speaks to our sensory receptors–our abilities (or lack thereof) to perceive color, sound, vibrance, touch and to connect these to something more objectively observable about our experiences. As we make it into the final room, we are left alone in the quiet serenity of “A Bird and a Bud” (2024), onlooking the quiet aura that emits from each carving.

Williamson tactfully uses shades that bounce onto the walls as the pieces lay against them to create a pale orange glow resembling a sunset and a neutral partner to its side. It is an embodiment of the illusory nature of perceiving. This is clearest as we onlook “Ray” (2024), defying laws of gravity and emitting another glow that patiently awaits a closer look. Through this exhibition, we are stewarded through a meditation space that honors our humanity and our creativity. It is through this space we learn more about ourselves and our capacity to conceptualize forms found in nature and in manmade craftings.

‍Hover Land Lover is on view until November 9th at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.