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The Waiting RoomPost an Event »

Royal NoneSuch Gallery

November 5 - November 29, 2010

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4231 Telegraph Avenue Oakland, CA 94609
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The Waiting Room The Waiting Room, an installation by Doug Garth Williams
Opening: Friday November 5, 2010, 7-10pm Events: Marketplace of ideas: Saturday November 13, 7-10pm Participants will be asked to record their ideas onto scraps of paper. They will assign a quality value to their idea on a scale from 1 to 10, which will be used to purchase ideas from other participants. Small Talk: Saturday November 20, 7-10pm A social experiment in conversation. Gallery hours: Saturday and Sunday from 1-4pm and by appointment. Doug Garth Williams will remove all traces of the Royal NoneSuch Gallery as an operating art space. In the empty storefront and blank exterior that remains, he will create all the trappings of what initially appears to be a legitimate business. Lured inside by provocative but ambiguous signage, unsuspecting passersby will find a simple waiting room filled with reflexive, equivocal, and subtly humorous furnishings designed to confound expectations and create an atmosphere of thoughtful uncertainty. What if the distractions provided by a waiting room offered no escape? What if they were intentionally designed to simply redirect our attention back to the waiting room itself? What if it wasn’t even clear what we were supposed to be waiting for? Waiting Room will serve as a reminder of the space between things. Rather than providing the typical distractions of a waiting room, the insistent reflexivity of the supporting materials will undermine all possibility of finding an escape route. About the artist: Doug Garth Williams makes work that explores perception and the apparent ease with which it can be altered. These investigations take the form of videos, interactive installations, and public interventions. Often using himself as a subject, they tend towards the reflexive, humorous and uncanny. His work is made with the hope of playfully confounding expectations and eliciting those tenuous unguarded moments of questioning. Doug holds an M.F.A. from Mills College, a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, and a certified world record for the longest nipple hair from the Guinness Book of World Records. Over the last year he has received a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship, the Herringer Family Award for Excellence in Art, won two jury prizes at festivals, and had 13 different pieces shown in more than a dozen exhibitions and screenings in galleries, museums, and festivals around the world.