The IAS galleries are closed for installation. We will open our next exhibition on May 23, 2025.
Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery
1156 High Street, Santa Cruz, CA
P (831) 459-3606
Email sesnon@ucsc.edu
September 19, 2025 - December 2025
12-5 p.m. Tuesday - Saturday
Deep in The Eye and The Belly is an ongoing body of work by Sam Williams entwining stories of cetacean bodies with imagined oceanic futures in which these bodies become shelter for humans who returned to the oceans in the wake of climate collapse.
This exhibition is a satellite exhibition of Weather & the Whale, on view at the Institute of the Arts and Sciences. Weather & the Whale, takes whale histories and migration routes as a starting point and provocation through which to promote climate justice in our communities. These exhibitions are the culmination of a two-year collaboration between the Institute of the Arts and Sciences and the Friedlaender Lab at UC Santa Cruz.
Sam Williams is an artist with a practice that intertwines moving-image, collage, choreography, sound and writing. His ongoing research focuses on multispecies entanglements, ecological systems, bodies-as-worlds and folk mythologies and how they propose possibilities for present and future ways of non-human-centric living. Sam is based in London, where he has been a resident of Somerset House Studios since 2019. He received his MA in Sculpture/Moving Image from the Royal College of Art (2016) and in 2021 was part of the Wysing Arts Centre Syllabus VI alternative education program. Sam has shown work at institutions including Chisenhale Gallery, Arnolfini, Siobhan Davies Dance, Somerset House and Studio Voltaire (UK), Atletika (LT); She Will (NO); Röda Sten Konsthall (SE); Kino Arsenal, Akademie der Kunst, Tanzhalle Wisenberg and B3 Biennale (DE) and in Autumn 2025 will have a solo exhibition in Santa Cruz, California. Sam has been artist in residence at Rupert (LT), PRAKSIS (NO), Hospitalfield (UK) and JOYA (ES). His work has been supported by Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust and in 2017 he received the Stuart Croft Foundation prize for Moving Image.
Sam Williams: Deep in The Eye and The Belly is organized in collaboration with the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery as part of An Aesthetics of Resilience and funded by a University of California Office of the President California Climate Action Seed Grant, with additional support from the Coha Nowark Art + Science Fund.
Image: Sam Williams, Still from Deep in The Eye and The Belly (Chapter 5)
