Bernard Williams

Liquor Store, 2007 (detail).

Culling from his West Humboldt Park surroundings, ubiquitous comic-book characters and everyday objects, Williams uses common materials in his show “Food and Liquor” to create a new version of the world we experience daily.

Suckers for pop culture will immediately spot Red Stripe, a black wooden cutout of Spider-Man with legs bent, hanging from a chunk of jagged graffiti that’s attached to a Red Stripe beer pendant; the piece captures a hearty smattering of other cultural symbols. The nearby mixed-media sculpture Muff is a whimsical play on object-word associations: A plush teardrop-shaped hunk of black fabric wearing white, wooden, leaf-shaped earmuffs sits on a pedestal.

But the giant, titular installation, Liquor Store, is the strongest piece. Carved entirely out of rough wood and then painted black, it offers inward views from the exterior or vice versa, giving the structure a delicate, ephemeral sense. At the same time, ads for Miller High Life, Jose Cuervo and Red Dog; generic signs for a 12-pack, cold cuts and milk; that same leaping Spider-Man; a Transformer’s head; and Korean characters infuse recognizable pop culture and cross-cultural elements into the rectangular structure. As a larger entity, the food and liquor store looks like the remains of a freshly sliced jigsaw puzzle.

Perhaps Spider-Man doesn’t directly connect to Korean-language characters and Jose Cuervo, but that’s not the point here. Williams’s careful arrangement of varied symbols asks us to consider how the American cultural landscape influences our viewing of something so commonplace as a neighborhood liquor store or earmuffs.