TANNER K WILLIAMS  

Hello, I’m Tanner K Williams. I’m a Los Angeles-based, queer, exMormon artist using repulsion and nostalgia to digest conversations of mental health, trigger social reeducation, and disintegrate myopic religious expectations of sex and gender. My anti-triumphant body of work enables viewers to grapple with difficult-to-approach religious and political issues by providing a familiar, albeit uncomfortable space. Gaudy absurdity contrasts with heavy, lived human experiences to present a satirical harmony of the yucky and the cute.

Through photography and sculpture, my recent work focuses on contrived situations and digitally reconstructed images in conversation with the history of painting and portraiture. My visual language is tongue-in-cheek, pseudo-sincere, and often as purposefully tasteless as a planned suburban community. The kitsch and the oppressive visual language within Mormonism has become one of my many instruments, fueled by the self-hatred, guilt, and shame that a cult can inspire in the individual. The TJ Maxx aesthetic, 90’s wallpaper and the myriad shades of beige that identify so many of our hometowns in the Republican West, textures that felt so suffocating, so bland, so lifeless in my queer youth, have become my most universal and compelling methods of communication for both friends and foes of religion. Making shock art about religious trauma no longer feels complex; but by satirically “oppressing” the exclusionary religious canon, we can reevaluate the parameters of who and what defines the holy and the sacred.

Rather than becoming yet another post-religious, embittered queer with nothing more to add to the conversation than “I hate the church,” I’ve developed a niche and relatable language that satirizes traumas and critiques hate groups in a nuanced, poignant way. This language is not one of overt symbols of hatred or destruction. Rather, a comical approach to objects, histories and aesthetics that reconsiders the oxymoronic, the ironic, and the irrational that make up the doctrinal foundation of the church.

LOS Angeles, USA

Artist - Creative Director - PHOTOGRAPHER - designer

BFA Studio Art - Brigham Young University

Photo, Video, creative direction, production design, Installation, costume design, Performance, dance, Sculpture, Sewing, Drawing, painting blah blah blahhhhh

Tannerkwilliamsart@gmail.com 

@TANTRON