Casemore Kirkeby is pleased to announce the opening on Saturday, September 8th of This Body Is Alive, the first solo exhibition with the gallery by Los Angeles-based artist Suné Woods. As a complete installation encompassing the main gallery, This Body Is Alive applies an optical foundation to the body using both the aquatic and the corporeal to address topics of humanism and global resource. Through depictions of visual intimacy Woods presents an unassailable reality of humanist evolution as a complex interdependence between all species.
In This Body Is Alive, a life-size, carpeted stage acts as a support for the body. For this part of the installation Woods notes Section 168 of San Francisco’s city sidewalk ordinance which prohibits individuals, with certain exceptions, from sitting or lying on the city’s public sidewalks. As a site-specific construct Woods offers a space to sit, rest, lie, sleep, and listen in her sound installation in an act of interconnection.
Woods’ practice conflates photography with collage, audio installation with video, the emphasis being on the constantly moving image whether it be inferred, as seen in her collage, or resolved by way of video production. In a single-channel video entitled Fish Dance, Woods presents footage of her body in water with a yellow jack fish that is compelled to remain close to her skin for nearly an hour. Woods’ video work questions our relationship with other species and the capacity and responsibility for us humans to not see ourselves as supreme beings. The impromptu underwater footage moves through waves and motion at a meditative speed, the bodies constitute a rhythmic singularity, a notable revealing that remains constant throughout the exhibition.
As the narrative on movement and materiality evolve, predominately concerning bodies of water, sculptural photographs emerge as actualized objects. Constructed as images on photographic paper and substantially reconfigured to become a larger oceanscapes, Woods expands the definition of photography beyond a physical frame. The result concerns notions of intimacy and its transmission through interpersonal relationships, herein most succinctly expressed as ecological.
Suné Woods (b. 1975, Montréal, Canada) works in Los Angeles. Woods received her BFA from University of Miami, in 1997, and MFA from California College of the Arts, in 2010. Most recently Woods was featured in Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018). Her work has been included in exhibitions at Light Work, Syracuse, New York (2017); Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York (2017); Urban Video Project, Syracuse, New York (2017); Papillion Art, Los Angeles (2015, 2014); Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles (2015); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, California (2012); Center for the Arts Eagle Rock, Los Angeles (2012); Performance Art Institute, San Francisco (2011); and Arts Commission Gallery, San Francisco (2009), among others. She has had residencies at Light Work (2016), Center for Photography at Woodstock (2015), Vermont Studio Center (2014), and Headlands Center for the Arts (2012). She is a recipient of a John Gutmann Photography Fellowship Award from the San Francisco Foundation (2015), Visions from the New California Award from the James Irvine Foundation (2012), and Murphy and Cadagon Fellowship (2009).
