1275 Minnesota St /
Jack Fischer Gallery
vestiges
Josh Smith / Vanessa Woods
Jack Fischer Gallery is pleased to announce Vestiges, an exhibition by married artists Vanessa Woods and Josh Smith, who explore the complicated dynamics of abstraction, intimacy and the body.
Vestiges consists of photographs and collages by Woods and Smith, who individually examine their experiences as parents and therein ideas of identity, intimacy, desire and the unknown. Despite using different media and approaches, their work is connected by a shared interrogation of the body, where the human form is revealed, obfuscated, and fractured. The use of extreme light and shadow provides a metaphor for the sense of mortality that comes with birth. In many of the images in the show, light reveals and enlivens the surfaces it encounters, while simultaneously acting as a tool of erasure and reorientation.
Vanessa Woods makes collages from her own photographs and found material that makes us question what we see and how it’s created. Her work is deconstructed and reassembled through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. In this series, Woods’ exploits the transformative properties of collage to erase the physical boundaries between individual bodies. Botanical material is also present in some Woods’ collages--working as a symbol of growth and fecundity.
“My relationship to photography and collage is one in which I explore my own experiences,” Woods says of the current series. “This work examines the changing experience a female body goes through after having children—it is both a maker and giver of life, but also has a finite life. As a mother, I’ve become exceedingly aware of my own mortality while the boundaries between my children’s bodies and my own has become increasingly blurry.”
Similarly, Smith’s role as a parent has informed his practice. “When my wife and I had three children within five years, we felt a swift change in our family dynamic,” says Smith. “Our new world contained extremes of emotion, where joy, vulnerability, frustration, and fear could be felt all at once. As we worked to understand our roles as parents, our relationship shifted. Photographing became a way of processing my experience, and the resulting black and white photos serve to reconstruct moments of awe and uncertainty that I was living in.” In Smith’s photographs, the domestic sphere becomes unidentifiable-- transformed by spare compositions and atmospheric light. Though these images originate from specific moments, the final works privilege poetic suggestion over that of the documentary.
Tapping into notions of erasure, intimacy and the body the works in Vestiges navigate the places between light and shadow reorienting artifice and reality. A selection of original collages and photographs made by Woods’ and Smith will be on display for the exhibition.