The Dreams of Small Animals
ArtYard
June 21–October 5, 2025
Frenchtown, NJ
Can we learn to perceive as other beings do? Can we even learn to perceive other beings at all—not as objects of knowledge, but emissaries of worlds beyond our grasp? In The Dreams of Small Animals, Ash Eliza Williams probes metaphysical boundaries in paintings that channel the sensory perceptions of flowers, frogs, bugs, and birds. Williams uses multi-panel compositions that recall the sequential logic of a storyboard, but rather than translating the nonhuman into a legible narrative, they render their subjects more mystical in works where the boundaries between subject and environment become porous, vibrational.
The erotic The Dreams of a Dandelion (2024) is an eighty-three-panel sequence filled with ambiguous clefts, hairy mounds, and proboscises entering slits, realized in a citric orange that makes you salivate a little. The painting reminds you that a flower is a genital organ—its pollination a multispecies coitus—and effectively suggests an organism that does not perceive by seeing, but by touching. And yet, eyes make a distinctive appearance here, as exaggerated pictograms on the wings of descending butterflies. Many lepidopterans have developed striking eye-like spots, but a flower cannot “see” them—or can it? Perhaps it feels the touch of their gaze. Williams’s work does not approximate the physical sensorium of a dandelion as much as it speaks to perception itself as a super-sensory and spectral realm of encounter.
Have you ever stared at a bug and felt it looking back? Most arthropods have sophisticated sight, and the misconception that their compound eyes provide a “low-resolution” optical system says more about the limits of human perception, with its fixation upon the image. Our own eyes are essentially a stereoscopic camera, but an arthropod perceives space, light, and motion in ways we cannot fathom. Dragonflies are thought to process up to ten times more visual information, encompassing colors and wavelengths that are invisible to humans. Bees see ultraviolet light, and use it to read a hidden language of flowers.
Williams’s exhibition provokes unique speculations on how perception is limited by our body schema, anatomically engrained and culturally reinforced. Human cosmologies have often gravitated toward four-fold scales of space and time: four directions, four elements, four seasons. As animals with four limbs, quadruple poetics may feel most comfortable to us. How would we perceive the manifold poetry of a creature with fifteen pairs of legs, like a house centipede, whose very presence makes many humans uncomfortable?