Friday, October 13, 2017

Suné Woods: To Sleep With Terra
Light Work Gallery

Price: free
Light Work Gallery
316 Waverly Ave., Syracuse University, Syracuse

In the exhibition, "To Sleep with Terra," Los Angeles-based artist Suné Woods uses a variety of source material from books, magazines, and news media to create three-dimensional collages and video. Together, this body of work challenges our notions of photography and explores the terror of a technological society spinning out of control. Woods created this work in 2015 during a period of extreme racial violence, police brutality, and mass shootings.

Woods says 2015 was no more violent than previous years, but what shifted was growing documentation by citizen journalists that undermined the public's denial and disbelief. For the artist, the process of tearing, crumpling, layering, and recombining photographic imagery was "the best way for me to articulate the complicated sensations that were arising while processing these streamed documentations of violence, ecological disaster, and a desire to understand more deeply how seemingly disparate things relate when they are mashed up in a visual conversation."

This mash-up of imagery is reminiscent of how we consume information every day?sometimes minute by minute?as we scroll through a frenetic onslaught of global disasters, degradation, and violence.

Suné Woods' collage work makes art of the ordinary ephemera in our daily lives and clarifies and reveals a truth just beneath its surface. Unafraid to confront us with the brutality that surrounds us, her work only grows in relevance and urgency.