The Production Line of Happiness

Christopher Williams @ AIC

With a career spanning 35 years, Christopher Williams (born 1956) now stands as one of the leading contemporary artists engaged in photography. Deeply invested in the techniques and history of photography, Williams is just as profoundly committed to contemporary art as a forum for intellectual inquiry and thoughtful opposition—resisting, for example, a capitalist society in which photographs typically act as agents of consumer spectacle. Through exacting mimicry—and stunningly beautiful images—Williams’s work has subtly questioned the conventions of photojournalism, picture archives, fashion, and commercial imaging. 

The upcoming AIC exhibition—a multipart installation conceived by the artist that spans three gallery spaces on three floors of the museum—is Williams’s first retrospective. It also marks a homecoming for the artist, who had his first-ever museum showing in 1982 at the Art Institute.

The exhibition opens this Friday the 24th with a special event scheduled for tomorrow the 23rd, which will see the coming together of an unconventional list of artists and writers to speak about the retrospective. 

Click here to learn more about the retrospective and here to learn more about the special event.