Cheza Willis

Cheza Willis is a Minnesotan and Maine-based theatre professional and visual artist. Through these practices Cheza has spent most of her life studying the human condition. She likes to explore human character by examining the cultural and societal influences within which it exists.

Cheza’s current art practice centers around painting, sculpting and video making. Utilizing these mediums, Cheza explores what it is to live a diasporic life as she straddles England and America. Using the comedy of the everyday and inspired by the golden age of British comedy, Cheza looks to translate her theatrical practice into tongue-in-cheek videos that reflect on her life past and present. Using basic crafting materials such as fabric, wool, and cardboard, Cheza creates sets, costumes, masks, puppets, and so on—any and all of the theatrical elements required for her artistic expression.

Through engaging with the tactile nature of everyday materials, the repetition of knitting actions and building and layering of papier mâché, I traverse the everyday world of actuality. These energies transform the physical world around them through rhythm, memory and shadow self. Like the mantras of monks or the whirling of dervishes, I get lost in my head and time becomes still. Splashes of color spill over and around, forming improvised lines over scattered textures and random forms, inviting the viewer to embrace the imperfect and the incomplete. Shapes, textures, bits and bobs, characterize old personages and the transcendent plurality of self. The work, frozen before you in temporality, becomes thoroughly exposed and through the unraveling of layers we can see lineage, memory, ancestry, and possibility.