The Bridge: Edreys Wajed

Edreys Wajed is a multidisciplinary creative artist based in Buffalo New York. He is an active draftsman, painter, jeweler, designer, curator, hip-hop emcee and producer under the pseudonym Billy Drease Williams. He is also an educator and the co-proprietor of the entrepreneurial creative venture Eat Off Art with his partner and wife Alexa Wajed. He is the son and father of creative artists spanning at least three generations in Buffalo. His work has been featured by the Albright-Knox in their Freedom Wall project completed in 2017, and by the Buffalo Sabres who presented his modified logo Breaking Barriers in 2021 honoring Val James, the National Hockey Leagues’ first African American player who made his NHL debut with the team in 1981. 

For the exhibition The Bridge Wajed has created works that explore the culture and language of Hip Hop, a musical genre with roots that go back more than fifty years, almost exactly paralleling his life, with important early moments in the genre taking place just months before his birth.  In an artist statement he states:        

"I probe and meander proficiently through music, video, theater, metalsmithing, illustration and painting; seeing art as language, and myself as multilingual. I investigate humanity through storytelling, consumerism and social justice, with an affinity for the beauty of human error in handmade objects, mark-making and documenting human experience."

Works produced for this exhibition explore encoded language unique to Hip Hop culture and the different forms of nonverbal communication used by those within it. Wajed seeks to decode parts of this language and create a bridge to make it more accessible, presenting work with a visual aesthetic that warmly invites the outsider in while also welcoming home individuals with similarly lived experiences.

"My art has always held a clean and linear graphic quality, typically consisting of black-and-white line-based drawings. Long and continuous lines, streams of conscious and zen on paper and sparse, choppy tally marks paired in bunches. This style served as the base for both abstract, non-figurative as well as fully realized figurative and portrait drawings.

As I’ve transitioned through various artistic and creative means of expression, I have also evolved and expounded on my visual art exploration, where I have reclaimed my passion for music and performance and paired it seamlessly into my latest paintings, which still incorporate line as the main element. The quality of lines vary, as each type of marking denotes a specific musical instrument or sound and its movement, uniquely interpreting music onto canvas or paper. Drawing sound. I’ve developed a system and unique musical notation incorporating layers of colors, text, line and what can be read or looked at as an urban or street art version of chart or sheet music.

My creative process begins by selecting a song that I have a connection with emotionally or association with from memories throughout my life, past and current. The song is played on repeat for several minutes, sometimes hours if necessary, as this begins the study of the song, its parts, vocals and instruments. I isolate each component of the song, piece by piece, translating its sound, movement and rhythm through the use of the symbols and marks I’ve developed, creating a painting or drawing that radiates music to the eye, sparking the imagination of the viewer to imagine the unfamiliar or recall the song from memories and experiences of their own.
Each painting stands as a visual representation of the audio recording and song itself with emotion, bounce and vibration. "

– Edreys Wajed