4 stars
Absence is everywhere in Matthew Arthur Williams’ new series of photographs. It’s there – and not there – in the barren grasslands where empty chairs sometimes sit in Williams’ pictures. When he appears – naked, posed, in repose – Williams embraces the solitariness in a display not so much an Eden-like retreat as a contemplation in search of himself.
The heart of this body of work made between 2024 and 2025 comes in Another Allegory, a twenty-one minute film developed during a residency at Cove Park and first seen in Nottingham in August 2025. Here, oblique little fragments of music, image and spoken word occupy the spaces without ever overwhelming them. Shot in hazy home movie style 16mm, the camera lingers on secret spaces that don’t look much in daylight, but after dark, who knows?
Images of chopped down trees alternate with close ups of Williams’ collaborator Blaize Henry playing violin. A bare torsoed young man plays a steel drum. A photograph of one of the film’s inspirations, late American composer Julius Eastman and his then lover, poet R Nemo Hill, flashes up. Underground electronicist Cleyra’s mournful reconstruction of Jill Scott’s song, Cross My Mind, provides an underscore.
It is from this the line, ‘I was just thinking about you’ becomes key to everything on and off screen. Throughout, a storm attempts to wash everything away. With nothing made explicit, what’s left is a sense of yearning in a work loaded with desire, where the only thing to hold on to is rain.
Stills, Edinburgh until 18 October
ends
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