This show puts you face to face with the artist right away. The portrait, hung on a grass-green wall, depicts Matthew Arthur Williams naked and leaning forward, elbows on his knees and his arms interlaced in front of his torso. The shutter release is in his hands as he stares at us. The image is suspended at the point of capturing and also being captured: a moment that is completely arresting.
Williams is a Glasgow-based photographer, visual and sound artist and DJ who works through these media to bring forth ideas about collaboration, representation, family, love and resistance. In Soon Come, his first major UK solo exhibition, Williams delves into his personal and ancestral past to explore home, labour and time.
The exhibition’s themes pivot around that title, Soon Come, a phrase used in the West Indies to acknowledge that you will return, outside of a commitment to the specifics of time. It encourages a slowing down, a trust that at some point, you will be back. This notion of slowness is replicated in William’s making, mainly using analogue techniques. In his black and white photography and 16mm film you always sense his attentiveness.
Moving from Williams’s portrait and into the first gallery space, a low square plinth takes up most of the floor. Flattened under its glass are images of the crumbling pottery chimneys of Stoke-on-Trent, his grandfather’s bus service medals and rows of terraced houses. We peer down, circling these landscapes from above, scale skewed as the image of a small pin badge takes up as much space as the bellied chimneys. A comment perhaps on the scale of these industrial sites and the monumental amount of invisible labour required to keep them ticking over.
Framed on the surrounding walls are photographs from William’s archive: close crops of larger images from Jamaica and Stoke, ancestral homes for the artist. In one we see a grave, open, surrounded by polished shoes and formal coats, the coffin-shaped hole seeming infinite. Overseeing this room are two portraits, one of Williams’s aunt and one of his uncle. Hung on opposite walls, they look in opposite directions. We meet them in the middle.
Sound drifts through the doorway at the end of the space, pulling us into the second gallery, vast and dimly lit. Two screens face each other, watched back and forth like a tennis match, as William’s film of his family’s journey is told through stories ranging from Jamaica to the UK, where they sought work.
The film is a collage of archive materials, performance and found footage. In one scene, a bird of prey hovers over Stoke’s industrial landscape, echoing back to the previous room. In another, hands grab and twist around arms, a point of connection and unity in a scene of flux. As the film draws to a close, the Chosen Few’s People Make the World Go Round echoes around the gallery. The accompanying shot, a blaring orange sun burning out at the end of the day, casts a golden glow over the space, illuminating the vitrines suspended from the ceiling at the back of the gallery. These yolky-yellow vitrines contain further artefacts from William’s archive: his grandfather’s metal medals and further prints, one featuring a wall emblazoned with the graffiti: “Hustler.”
Throughout, Williams brings to light the often overlooked side of the UK’s working class: how, when we think historically of miners, earthmovers and factory-workers, we tend to think of white people, those living in terraced streets and grinding along daily. The importance of the work done by immigrant communities at this time is seldom mentioned, these people who were welcomed into our belching factories but never acknowledged for their contributions that kept the country growing.
Some Come is both essential and compelling. As we leave, we see one last self-portrait of Williams, this time not looking at us but out of the frame back into the gallery, to his personal internal landscape, as if he will always return to this place that we are now moving away from. He leaves us with the thought that home is, all at once, the place we are, the place we are born and the place we are making – and no one has the right to contest that.
• Matthew Arthur Williams: Soon Come is at Dundee Contemporary Arts until 26 March.
