Artist's Statement

Mike Williams

The Protestant theologian Charles Harold Dodd coined the term eschaton in 1935 to describe the end of the world as a “divinely ordained climax of history.” The end has defined us from the beginning. (I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.) Strategically, the plutocratic end times of a mock republic are saturated in eschatology, one that twists war, natural disaster, man-made catastrophe, pestilence and poverty into welcome equalizers. The pallor of a new gilded age, envisioned in our darkest instincts, forces an anomalous concoction of hallucinatory revelation – a land of paradox, where pictures will do. 


These photographs were made traveling across the United States. They describe a surreal, non-narrative allegory of social and political anxiety in the US. I'm interested in the intersection of photography and language and see my work as a kind of experimental fiction or image fiction. Photographs are dangerous. Lens based imagery is at its core a paradox. The scientific exactitude of photographic realism is inevitably transformative. An uncanny group of pictures is like an alternate universe best taken sitting down. Embracing the artifice is my only advice.