Rifle On The Wall by Rachel O-Williams: Curated by Pacheanne Anderson

Pacheanne Anderson
Supporting and Centring Queer, Trans*, Black & POC Artists

Our Mission
With community-building, knowledge-sharing and collaboration at the centre, Pacheanne Anderson Gallery & Advisory provides exhibition, workshop screening, performance and peer-networking opportunities to a broad selection of Queer, Trans*, Black & POC artists. Pacheanne Anderson Gallery & Advisory’s aim is to support and establish sustainable careers for ‘marginalised’ artists and art practitioners who work across a wide variety of different mediums. Pacheanne Anderson Gallery & Advisory also encourages a diverse approach to creating new paid opportunities in non-art-specific sites.

Director & Founder
Pacheanne Anderson is a curator, writer and consultant and artist who curates arts and cultural events with the goal of putting Queer, Trans*, Black & POC Artists in spaces where they’re more likely to meet collectors, journalists and other people of a certain stature in the art world. Anderson’s central focus is to dispel any restrictions and barriers to entry for artists who have previously been underrepresented in the art world.

Pacheanne Anderson Gallery & Advisory presents artist Rachel O-Williams in an intentional and bold presentation of painting and photography work. Born in Philadelphia, raised between Hastings and Hackney, with Nigerian parents, Rachel O-Williams delves into a broad visual reflection of her multifaceted and socially complex upbringing. 

Rifle On The Wall represents the complexities of becoming an adult, maturing and looking back on the ways our lived experiences have shaped who we are today. Using contemporary voices and media to reproduce, reinterpret and share with those who might relate, the exhibition fulfils the ideology that there is a time for everything to be spoken about, or even questioned. Stemming from a quote by Russian playwright Anton Chekhov: “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act” Rifle On The Wall takes shapes through reflecting different eras of O-Williams’ childhood, adolescence and adult life. 

Rifle On The Wall brings together themes of family, relationship trauma, iimmigration, social integration or disintegration, [dis]-location, love and loss simultaneously. These works are melancholic, witty but complex in their form. With collage and reinterpretation of strong visual imagery, the photographic works and collages powerfully explore intricate, but common, modes of existence in a way that only a 1st generation Black Brit of Nigerian heritage could. With controversial or taboo conversations around farming and intergenerational perspectives of womanhood, Rifle On The Wall acts as a visual interpretation of what it means to find oneself through art practice and research in a political act of healing.

The exhibition brings together different sides of the artists’ practices to evoke various conversations on the diaspora: conversations on being Black, being British, learning your heritage through research and using the format of the archive to hone in on family. Rachel O-Williams has also invited some of her favourite artist photographers, Darryl Daley and Ryan Prince to join this conversation with one selected work each. Both artists are of Caribbean Heritage and use different visual stimuli and references to produce similar conversations in a beautiful and considered way. Both artists represent another nuanced perspective on the ideas discussed in Rifle On The Wall, ultimately re-engaging the rich conversation on the precariousness of black life in England. 

Curated by Pacheanne Anderson

Exhibiting Artists:

Rachel O-Williams /@r.solawilliams: 

Rachel is a multi-disciplinary visual artist whose work explores the connection between her past and present, interrogating her physical surroundings within the context of social and political (dis)integration from her personal perspective and in relation to cultural construction.

Darryl Daley / @darryl_daley: 

Darryl Daley is an Afropean interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. His work explores themes of Blackness as an identity and expression continually redefining itself by juxtaposing film, sound and graphic design.

Ryan Prince / @ryanadrianprince: 

Ryan Prince is a documentary and portrait photographer based in London. Ryan uses the camera as a tool to explore themes that revolve around his own identity as a black British male from the Jamaican diaspora.