Shawn Williams

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Inspired by my family’s love of working with their hands, my work is a kind of nostalgic homage to the American  middle-class domestic work ethic, where personal pleasure and self-worth can be realized by working with one’s hands to build, repair or to simply keep busy by “tinkering” away on home improvement projects.  The flatness of the screenprinting process emphasizes the romanticized imagery in advertisements and catalogues from the 1950’s, updated by the sculptural use of construction materials like drywall and cement board as printing surfaces.  These ideal images of people effortlessly working on their home improvement projects offer obvious humor to anyone who has tackled projects like these on their own.  Ultimately, these prints are concerned with the “idea” of work itself, that is the contrast between our ideal goals and the struggle to achieve those goals.