Transient Curated is pleased to present GEARS, a series of 222 digital drawings by Sean Williams. Each gear works on its own, but Williams thinks of them as parts of a single machine, individual pieces that fit into a larger, ongoing narrative.
Created over the last four years, GEARS show the range of Williams’ experience, working across illustration, painting, and animation. Similar parts recur and recombine across the series: faces and masks, eyes, hands, skeletons, hearts, and more elements that keep surfacing. Some drawings are dense and crowded, stacked with motifs and scrawled text, others hold a single subject against a flat field of color.
The marks themselves cover a wide range. Loose, almost childlike line drawing sits next to hard-edged shapes, smeared paint, neon glows, and the halftone dots reminiscent of printed material. The tone swings just as far, from a small house captioned "I MISS HOME WITH YOU" to a skull-faced figure dragging an axe across a red landscape.
"I wanted something that felt ancient but also felt futuristic"
For Williams, machinery is where this past and future meet. The series builds towards a larger artwork Williams calls War Machine. He describes it less as a single character than as a network, the way war itself is never one thing, but a tangle of many pieces.
Williams has built GEARS the way a mythology gets told: in scattered fragments over time. The pieces are left out to be found and assembled by whoever comes across them. "I want to be able to leave pieces here and there," he says. "But whoever comes back and finds them, that's for them."
CURATED