Williams herself is a close observer. While creating Undying, she recalled looking for “the painting” in films, searching for shots where story and composition crystallized into an emotional punch. The resulting paintings, based on film stills, offer themselves up as a type of fan fiction that attenuates what is otherwise a fleeting erotic exchange. The Man Who Fell to Earth (2023), Persona (2023), Blue Velvet (2023), and Thirst (2023) offer a study in cinematic convention: all feature women on their backs under hulking partners, captured from the intrusive vantage point of an over-the-shoulder shot. Blacula (2023) and Videodrome (2023) study a slightly different trope, staging women who luxuriate under the influence of sinister forces beyond the frame. They may later meet their demise, but here, they are the only girl in the world.

The ambiguity of gendered pleasure and its mediation on film formed the central topic of early feminist theory. Indeed, the heyday of b-movie slashers in the 1970s was accompanied by a wave of canonical texts including Laura Mulvey’s treatise on visual pleasure and narrative cinema. The essay posited that film was a visual language developed by men for men, whose very structure preclude the possibility of female agency. Scholars since have insisted on greater complexity. Carol J. Clover’s concept of the “final girl” and Linda Williams theory of excessive emotion as cathartic cinematic experience offer models of identification for audiences of any gender to enjoy horror films as embodied subjects. And yet the idea of enjoyment sits uneasily with horror. Our pleasure as viewers is often proportional to the misery that unfolds on screen. For example, the “final girl” is always tortured and miraculously survives, only to be condemned to return, again and again, in sequel after sequel, to face down the killer once more. What do we extract from these female protagonists? Film theorist Linda Williams suggests that extreme violence, sex, and emotion are hallmarks of the genre, whose excesses audiences consume like the vampires they watch on screen. Taken together, the works in Undying deliver a closely cropped meditation on the dynamics of the vampiric in both filmic subject and spectator alike.

Born 1984 in Ohio, USA
Lives and works in Brooklyn, USA

Known for her large-scale paintings of stylized, sentient, yet ambiguously generated female figures, Robin F. Williams (b. 1984) employs a variety of techniques, including oil, airbrush, poured paint, marbling, and staining of raw canvas to create deeply textured and complexly constructed paintings. Combining a masterful technical understanding with an innate sense of curiosity, Williams fuses practices from social media channels such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube with references to early modernism, pop culture, advertising, and cinema, to challenge the systemic conventions around representations of women. Williams received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.