EXHIBITION

PHI is proud to present Bingo, the first solo museum-scale exhibition for artist Nico Williams. While he has received sustained attention from the art world in recent years, this exhibition marks his largest institutional presentation to date and features multiple new works created especially for the occasion.

Like many of his contemporaries, Williams is devoted to questioning the enduring opposition between art and craft that has structured much art historical discourse over the past centuries. He suggests instead that these two categories are mutually indebted to each other to the point of indistinction. Undoing by making has been a particularly potent strategy for Williams, who has always been interested in the critical reproduction and reappropriation of objects and phenomena from pop culture, such as VHS tape and video game covers, grocery store flyers, foldable camping chairs, items of clothing, lotto tickets, food packaging, and shopping bags.

Recently, Williams has become interested in the game of bingo, which has a complex history that harkens back to Renaissance-era Italy—much like the glass beads that are widely used by artists and craftspeople around the world. Historically, the practice of beadwork was shaped by trade between European settler-colonial forces and Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island. While the former brought a vast quantity of Venetian glass beads with them to use as a bartering tool—with the goal of simultaneously growing their control over the territory—the latter rapidly integrated the new material into their beading practices. In spite of colonial violence, beadwork has endured through the transmission of knowledge from elders.

Derived from Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia [The Clearance of the Lot of Italy], a game of chance that has been played in Italian cities since the 1530s, bingo proliferated at a time where economies were shifting from feudalism to capitalism, emboldened by the acceleration of international trade and the Western expansionist aspirations that gave rise to modern colonialism. It is an apt metaphor, then, for Williams’s practice more generally; while it enables us to think about complex notions like economy, circulation, cultural hierarchy, and disparity, it also mirrors the playfulness and sensuousness of his work, and its potential to generate community.

Curator: Daniel Fiset