Faculty Member Suné Woods @ Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery
Suné Woods: To Sleep With Terra
Light Work is pleased to present the work of photo-collage and video artist Suné Woods, To Sleep With Terra. This will be Woods’ first solo exhibition with Light Work since her residency here in 2016. The exhibition will be on view in the Kathleen O. Ellis Gallery at Light Work from August 28―October 19, 2017, with an opening reception with the artist on Wednesday, September 13, from 5-6pm.
As part of the opening reception, we invite gallery patrons to a special presentation at 6pm. Infused with wordplay, found imagery, sound and moving images in multimedia form by Woods, award-winning poet Fred Moten, and Syracuse University Professor and musicologist James Gordon Williams. Titled You are mine. I see now, I’m a have to let you go, this collaboration was generously supported by Syracuse University’s Humanities Center and is part of the 2017-18 Syracuse Symposium: Belonging. Both events are free, open to the public, and offer refreshments.
Urban Video Project (UVP) will feature Suné Woods’ video work, A Feeling Like Chaos, concurrently with When a Heart Scatter, Scatter, Scatter in the Everson’s Robineau Gallery and To Sleep with Terra at Light Work. Woods says that A Feeling Like Chaos “attempts to make sense of a continuum of disaster, toxicity, fear, and a political system that sanctions violence towards its citizens.” This installation will be on view on the Everson Museum’s north facade September 14―23 and October 5―28, 2017, from dusk until 11:00 p.m. Find more information at urbanvideoproject.com.
Los Angeles-based artist Suné 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 sites such as the family to understand the larger sociological phenomenon, imperialist mechanisms, and formations of knowledge. She is interested in how language is emotively expressed, guarded and translated through the absence and presence of the physical body.
To Sleep With Terra includes photo-collage and works on paper that explore Wood’s ongoing interest in creating her own topographies, gleaned from science, travel, and geographic magazines and books of the past fifty years. The collage work explores the social phenomena that indoctrinate brutality and the ways in which propaganda and exploitation have employed photography.
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.”
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Suné Woods has participated in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Light Work. Woods has received awards from the Visions from the New California Initiative, as well as The John Gutmann Fellowship Award, and The Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer. She has exhibited her work at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Lowe Art Museum, Miami, and The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2010 and is currently Visiting Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Art.