Derr sonata

Justene Williams was born in Bankstown NSW and educated at University of Western Sydney and Sydney College of the Arts. She has exhibited widely in Australia and Europe since the early 1990s including the 2004 Adelaide Biennial, ‘Perfect for every occasion: photography today’, Heide Museum of Modern Art 2007. She has held residencies in Rotterdam and Tokyo.

Williams has frequently pondered the meaning of a world where image saturation is a given and where she is complicit in that. This also occurs in ‘Derr sonata’ where the artist has become the image and where discernment of the nature of the image is obscured, confused, in addition to the nature of the artist within such an environment. In Anthony Gardner’s 2009 essay, ‘An isle full of noises’ in the AGNSW contemporary projects brochure, he writes, ‘It is about weaving through tempests of image and sound to regather a sense of self… It is about neither art nor the artist being perceived as redemptive or nihilistic, restorative or amnesiac…’ ‘It’s about playing with the questions,’ as Williams says.