The Brooklyn Rail

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?

The painting Night Pollinator (2022) conjures a house centipede as an immense, glowing apparition on the sea. If it spoke, this floating entity would say, “Be not afraid.” In the book of Revelation, angels appear with “many eyes,” while Ezekiel describes divine beings as “wheels within wheels.” What if these were not just metaphors of strangeness, but glimpses unto other scales—what if eyes are really stars, and wheels are planetary orbits? To encounter an angel, then, would really be an ecstatic glimpse of a measure beyond the human. In the interdimensional encounter between a human and a house centipede, neither organism can ever really know what the other beholds.

The suggestion of a two-way alien encounter recurs in Dreams of a Frog in a Riopel Pond (2024), where giant searching flashlights resemble UFO tractor beams. Through a frog’s point of view, the nocturnal fieldwork of biologists at a scientific field station in Virginia becomes a kind of abduction scene. But the most striking aspect of this painting is not the suggestion of multispecies sci-fi. It’s the visual rhythm of horizon lines throughout the sixty-nine panels that suggest a uniquely amphibian poetics of space, one that mirrors the liminality of a life spent half underwater.

Williams’s work becomes stronger the more it leans into these rhythmic, non-representational instincts. Dreams of a Starling (2024) has a tempo set by repeating suns and moons, like the celestial metronomes of a bird famous for its synchronized flocking. Starlings form poly-harmonic swarms that actually demonstrate how perception is a kind of dialogue, one that unfolds across a sea of selves. The phenomenon, called a “murmuration” because of the sound made by thousands of fluttering wings, also hints at the mysterious transfer of information that allows the starlings to move as one body, which human researchers are unable to decipher. Waves of movement can pass through a murmuration at nearly the speed of sound.

The exhibition includes ample ephemera of the artist’s process, emphasizing a practice grounded in rituals of presence. While Williams takes inspiration from the attention of scientists, their own work brings subjective weight to the word “observe,” as a reverent act that shapes everything it touches. A gaze brushes, penetrates. The eyes on a butterfly’s wing are revelatory signs that perception is always a form of contact. In its visitation of the dandelion, the butterfly performs an Annunciation, the flutter of its gaze a conception.