Enceinte

The work of Brian Wood

Church of St. Paul the Apostle

March 7 - April 1

Curator: Michael Berube

 

Wood states:

“The pre-lingual lack of separation from one’s mother and the undifferentiated void of the infant’s world quickly give way to the necessary experience of difference, boundaries, self-awareness, language, and time. The death of Orpheus is an arresting image of the tail-end of this state: his body torn to pieces and cast into the landscape while his head is held by the flowing river Hebrus, singing as it is swept out to sea. In that head, floating to Lesbos, live memories of underworld and ecstasy. I’m particularly interested in the mysterious way images constantly arrive in consciousness, fluoresce, and die. All this in a flash that remains largely unconscious as images instantly reify toward meaning and language and are then put to service as identity, self, and workaday narcissism. I experience the process of drawing as a tracing of arising being and imagery, shifting mental states, embodied experience, and fragments of memory. Once reaching a state of holding/stasis and fully immanent with meaning, but just before solidifying into a particular meaning, the drawing is complete. The resultant image often feels very alien to me and each drawing is quite different.

This exhibition has coalesced around mourning for my mother, Phyllis Cicily Ana Wood, who recently passed away. It will include work that refers to my earliest experience of mother and the show will be dedicated to her.”

 

brianwoodstudio.com

 

Read Holland Cotter's (from the New York Times) review here