Light Work will present “To Sleep With Terra,” featuring the work of photo-collage and multi-channel video artist Suné Woods. This will be Woods’ first solo exhibition with Light Work since her tenure as an artist-in-residence in 2016. The exhibition will be on view in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery at Light Work from Aug. 28- Oct. 19, with an opening reception with the artist Wednesday, Sept. 13, from 5-6 p.m.
Suné Woods, “Mothership,” 2015, pigment print
Following the opening, at 6 p.m., gallery patrons are invited to an experience infused with wordplay, found imagery, sound and moving images in multimedia form with Woods, award-winning poet Fred Moten and Syracuse University professor and musicologist James Gordon Williams. The presentation, titled “You are mine. I see now, I’m a have to let you,” was made possible by the generous support of the Syracuse University Humanities Center and is part of the 2017-18 Syracuse Symposium: Belonging. This event is free and open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
In conjunction with works on view at Light Work, Urban Video Project will feature Woods’ video “A Feeling Like Chaos” at its outdoor architectural projection venue on the northern facade of the Everson Museum of Art. “A Feeling Like Chaos” attempts to make sense of a continuum of disaster, toxicity, fear and a political system that sanctions violence toward its citizens. The video installation will be on view Sept. 14-16, from dusk-11 p.m. Find more information online at urbanvideoproject.com.
Los Angeles-based artist Woods creates multi-channel video installations, photographs, sculpture and collage. Her practice examines absences and vulnerabilities within cultural and social histories. She also uses microcosmal entities such as family to understand the larger sociological phenomenon, imperialist mechanisms and formations of knowledge. She is interested in how language is emoted, guarded and translated through the absence/presence of the physical body.
“To Sleep With Terra” includes photo-collage and works on paper that explore Woods’ ongoing interest in creating her own topographies, gleaned from science, travel, and geographic magazines and books of the past 50 years. The collage work explores the social phenomena that indoctrinate brutality and the ways in which photography has been used for propaganda and exploitation.
Woods has said of her artistic journey:
“Collage seemed the best way for me to articulate all the complicated sensations that were arising for me while processing these streamed documentations of violence, ecology and a desire to understand more deeply how seemingly disparate things relate when they are mashed up in a visual conversation.”
Woods has participated in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Center for Photography at Woodstock and Light Work. Woods is a recipient of the Visions from the New California initiative, the John Gutmann Fellowship Award and the Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer. Her work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Lowe Art Museum, Miami; and the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. She received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2010 and currently is a visiting faculty member at Vermont College of Fine Art.
Gallery hours for this exhibition are Monday-Thursday 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Friday 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday 1 p.m.-9 p.m. Light Work is closed on all major holidays.
All exhibitions, lectures, talks and receptions are free and open to the public.
