EXHIBITION

Tyler Cala Williams, Elastic Synapse
at/with PARTICIPANT INC
Sept 13 – Oct 25, 2026
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Sunday, noon-7pm

Opening Reception
Sunday, Sept 13, 7-9pm
116 Elizabeth Street, Floor 1, New York, NY 10013

Elastic Synapse is multidisciplinary artist Tyler Cala Williams’ first solo exhibition, as well as their first body of oil paintings. Drawing from personal memory and diasporic visual culture, Williams’ practice examines what is lost, mutated, and newly formed as images move across mediums. Consisting of oil paintings and mounted prints, this exhibition marks a shift in Williams’ previous digital practice that focused on disrupting Western European surrealist works by inserting themselves or their friends as twisted thoughts into the composition. This work is more personal. 

Through pixelation, moiré patterning, perspectival distortion, hyperreal rendering, and chromatic disruption, Williams destabilizes fixed notions of representation and interrogates how Black visuality circulates within contemporary image economies. By embracing slippage and material transformation, their work reanimates the Black imagination as a space of fugitivity, care, and alternative possibility.

Williams culls images in a process that feels like spiritual image mining. While gathering images, they give themself and the images permission to gravitate and speak to one another freely. Bits of photos off the internet are digitally rendered with bits of memes, photos from their own camera roll, and/or parts of magazine editorials to then be devotionally rendered into meticulous oil paintings on canvas, honoring the connection that every visual element sparked in Williams’ brain and body. Like intrusive thoughts nestled in brain corners finally given a little room to roam and play with fractal memories.

FULL PRESS RELEASE

Tyler Cala Williams is an American artist based between New York, Chicago, and New Jersey. Born and raised in Trenton, New Jersey, Williams received a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design at The New School in 2020. Williams has exhibited internationally including at Wunika Mukah Gallery, Lagos, Nigeria; Balance Club Culture Festival in Leipzig, Germany; and Espace Voltaire in Paris, France; and nationally at Art Basel Miami with Jeffrey Deitch; MOCADA Brooklyn; and the Kennedy Center in Boston, Massachusetts to name a few. Their writing has appeared in publications associated with the Hammer Museum at UCLA, and their artwork has been featured in BOY.BROTHER.FRIEND, King Kong Magazine, Paper Magazine, Circus Magazine, GUT Magazine, The Face, It’s Nice That, and LN-CC. In addition to their studio practice, Williams has created album artwork for recording artists such as LYZZA, Anysia KYS, and Liv.e, among others.

Tyler Cala Williams, When You Remember, 2024.