Silver Gelatin Print, 20 x 16 in.
Vanessa Woods investigates the essence of motherhood. She explores the body with extensive layering and re-photography, capturing the physical and psychological transformations of the maternal journey. Her work challenges traditional depictions, presenting an intimate and nuanced portrayal of her experience becoming a mother.
Silver Gelatin Print, 10 x 8 in.
My collages re-imagine and re-contextualize contemporary, historical, and personal narratives. My current body of work, titled Vestiges (2017–), is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, artist books, sculpture, and 16mm films to interrogate maternal experience.
Unique Collage, 14 x 11 in.
Vestiges examines maternal experience as related to the body and identity. In this work, I investigate the tensions of motherhood while acknowledging its paradoxes. Bodies and identities are multiplied and erased through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine, break, grow, shrink, and reassemble. The range of visual strategies used are meant to generate spaces of vertigo, confusion, ambivalence, and reorientation. I want the collages to speak to the extraordinary fact that the maternal body and mind are physically and biologically remade through the process of becoming a mother. I also want to explore the conflicts that live within maternal experience; the need to simultaneously hold on to and let go of my children, to extend my body to them and reclaim it for myself, and the physical experience of being both embodied and disembodied.
Unique Collage, 30 x 22 in.
Silver Gelatin Print, 11x 14 in.
I begin every day in my studio with a strong coffee. I work from 4-6 AM before my family is awake. I often listen to audiobooks and sometimes the ideas I encounter in these books influence the work. I also work on many collages at once.
Unique Collage, 30 x 22 in.
When I began Vestiges in 2017, I was using exclusively found/sourced material. The work mined the male-dominated depictions of the erotic female form. I was interested in reconfiguring those bodies into desexualized sculptural forms that explored alternate roles for the female body— as a maker of life, mother, and partner. But as I was making those collages, using only found material felt limiting. Ultimately, I realized that I could generate all the source material myself to speak more specifically about my body and my experience. Subsequently, I began photographing my body alongside my children’s bodies. Since then, I have shot all the photographs used in my collages. I shoot everything on black and white film and make my prints which allows me the most control in executing my vision.
Unique Collage, 30 x 22 in.
Vanessa Woods (b. 1979, San Diego, CA) is a Bay Area-based artist working in photography, 16mm film, collage, and sculpture. Her work uses a range of visual strategies and a hybrid approach to image-making to explore discourse around identity, motherhood, and gender in contemporary art.
Vanessa Woods Current + Upcoming shows:
Lacuna
Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco
Show Dates: June 22-July 27, 2024
Artist Talk, June 29, 1:30-2:30 PM
Forecast 2024
SF Camerawork, San Francisco
Show Dates: July 16-September 7, 2024
Opening reception: Friday, July 19, 2024, 6-8 PM
For Your Viewing Pleasure
Each week, we carefully select five artists whose remarkable talents and notable contributions to the art world deserve special recognition. As curators deeply involved in the contemporary art scene, we are excited to share these fresh discoveries with you.
ANTONIA KUO (b. 1987) was born in New York, New York and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Kuo is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, film, sculpture, drawing, painting, and printmaking.
COLLEEN KEIHM received a BS from Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA and an MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago. Keihm’s work is included in the photography collection at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago.
ALEJANDRO T. ACIERTO is an artist, musician, and curator whose work highlights the impact of colonial legacies across technologies, material culture, and the environment. Working within and across expanded forms of documentary, new media, creative scholarship, and sound, he has presented projects and screenings for the 2019 Havana Biennial in Matanzas, Cuba, and MCA Chicago.
XI LI (b. 1995 Suzhou, China) is an artist who works with photography, video, and installation to focus on the process of image-making, narrative shifts, and nature of preservation within history and image culture both collectively and individually.
ROBERT CHASE HEISHMAN's artistic practice is conceptual, experimental, and expansive – working across photographic image-making, film/video, and painting.
Out and About
What to watch, read, and experience, as curated by the Collé team.
▼ WATCH
DIIV: Everyone Out
Everyone Out is from the new DIIV album, Frog In Boiling Water.
Animation/Editing: Aaron Anderson
Creative Direction: Parker Sprout
▼ READ
Arthur Jafa's 52 Walker Show Tests the Limits of Social Propriety
The artist continues a tradition of pushing the bounds in his exhibition with the Tribeca gallery, a rotation of provocative imagery and film.
▼ LISTEN
Tourist Language – Flowertown
Flowertown embodies a lo-fi, romantic, rain-soaked essence, evoking images of well-loved, tattered books on the shelves of an eclectic library. The soft dynamic between the members, with whispered vocals and a simple drum machine is captivating, occasionally dissolving into comforting feedback.
