Both an artist's book and comprehensive inquisition of D'Angelo Lovell
Williams’s work to date, Contact High offers an expansive engagement with the
visualization of desire and depiction of the Black body. Williams's narrative
images reflect the many forms in which Black queer people exist and have existed
historically within each other's lives, picturing them as sitters, lovers,
caregivers, or shadows. Williams's work is guided by their life experience and
an interrogation of their own perspective, as well as wider questions around the
representation of race, class, sexuality, gender, and intimacy. The title
Contact High references the importance of touch and gesture in Williams's work,
and alludes to heightened senses and intuitive movement. From self-portraits to
collaborations with community, Williams's photographs visualize the Black body
in performative scenes that are theatrical, dance-like, and occasionally
mundane, pointing towards collective histories and Black ancestral practices. At
the heart of these intimate, dialogic images are notions of kinship and
spirituality interweaved with quietly political and radical gestures. Williams’s
unfaltering gaze insists on visibility and deference, and creates scenes in
which Black and queer voices are the authority. The dynamics that play out
between families, cultures, friends, lovers, ancestors and descendants are
visualized as a spectrum of care, tenderness, and vulnerability, speaking to the
nuances of our complex lives often overlooked by historical depictions.
