Kristine Woods, Such Is
19 May–30 June 2019
Opening Sunday 19 May 3–6pm
MBnb
520 West 143rd Street #2
New York NY 10031
+1 917 293 3507
Thursday –Saturday 1–6pm and by appointment
take the A,B,C,D or 1 to 145th Street
Janice Guy is delighted to announce Such Is, a solo exhibition of serial weavings, drawings and abstract sculpture by Kristine Woods at Mbnb in Harlem.
Kristine Woods (1964 Chicago) earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently had a solo exhibition, Regarding & Regardless, at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2018 and participated in The Portrait is Political at BRIC, New York, 2019. Later this year she will have a solo exhibition at Geary Contemporary, New York. A recipient of a Creative Capital Artists Grant, she spent the fall of 2018 in residency at Textilsetur Islands, Blonduos, Iceland. She is full time faculty at The Maryland Institute College of Art and lives and works in New York.
In the details of a text by Gregg Bordowitz, the edges in Kristine Woods’ weavings, drawings, constructions and sculptural forms are said to all be achieved through abscission — the natural detachment of parts of a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit. The artist’s works are actually determined through a fervent, almost catechismal, assay of the very materials used. They are woven, felted, cut, sanded, and joined during the exacting and repetitive process of their making. Each art work is achieved by a thorough process that is both structured and structuring, composed and decomposed, created and undone; each piece touched to the point of something canceled but not void. Each is an object of devotion.
Every act by Woods upon her materials can be evaluated by two co-ordinate axes: the abscissa is the artist, the ordinate is divinity. Whatever she does to matter she also does to the essence. Visible or not, the meeting point of essence and matter, the sacred and the profane, is located in every detail.
“The purpose seems to be to ennoble the common, to endow worldly things with hieratic beauty; to attune the comparative to the absolute, to associate the detail with the whole, to adapt our own being with its plurality, conflicts and contradictions, to the all-transcendent unity . . ." *
Can such a "unity" achieve credibility? Can it survive the mutations of spectacular dishonesty or gene-spliced through Crispr technology to achieve the genetic make-up of truth? That’s what’s at stake. Woods’ art presents the truth of her convictions enacted onto nothing more and nothing less than the anatomy of her materials.
MBnb is an ongoing artwork in honor of the great Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. It was conceived, in part, to explore what it might mean to "sell something and succeed in life” in what is euphemistically referred to as the sharing economy, fifty years after Broodthaers uttered those famously doomed, aspirational words.
* Freely adapted from Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, A Philosophy of Religion.
Opening Sunday 19 May 3–6pm
MBnb
520 West 143rd Street #2
New York NY 10031
+1 917 293 3507
Thursday –Saturday 1–6pm and by appointment
take the A,B,C,D or 1 to 145th Street
Janice Guy is delighted to announce Such Is, a solo exhibition of serial weavings, drawings and abstract sculpture by Kristine Woods at Mbnb in Harlem.
Kristine Woods (1964 Chicago) earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently had a solo exhibition, Regarding & Regardless, at Virginia Commonwealth University, 2018 and participated in The Portrait is Political at BRIC, New York, 2019. Later this year she will have a solo exhibition at Geary Contemporary, New York. A recipient of a Creative Capital Artists Grant, she spent the fall of 2018 in residency at Textilsetur Islands, Blonduos, Iceland. She is full time faculty at The Maryland Institute College of Art and lives and works in New York.
In the details of a text by Gregg Bordowitz, the edges in Kristine Woods’ weavings, drawings, constructions and sculptural forms are said to all be achieved through abscission — the natural detachment of parts of a plant, typically dead leaves and ripe fruit. The artist’s works are actually determined through a fervent, almost catechismal, assay of the very materials used. They are woven, felted, cut, sanded, and joined during the exacting and repetitive process of their making. Each art work is achieved by a thorough process that is both structured and structuring, composed and decomposed, created and undone; each piece touched to the point of something canceled but not void. Each is an object of devotion.
Every act by Woods upon her materials can be evaluated by two co-ordinate axes: the abscissa is the artist, the ordinate is divinity. Whatever she does to matter she also does to the essence. Visible or not, the meeting point of essence and matter, the sacred and the profane, is located in every detail.
“The purpose seems to be to ennoble the common, to endow worldly things with hieratic beauty; to attune the comparative to the absolute, to associate the detail with the whole, to adapt our own being with its plurality, conflicts and contradictions, to the all-transcendent unity . . ." *
Can such a "unity" achieve credibility? Can it survive the mutations of spectacular dishonesty or gene-spliced through Crispr technology to achieve the genetic make-up of truth? That’s what’s at stake. Woods’ art presents the truth of her convictions enacted onto nothing more and nothing less than the anatomy of her materials.
MBnb is an ongoing artwork in honor of the great Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers. It was conceived, in part, to explore what it might mean to "sell something and succeed in life” in what is euphemistically referred to as the sharing economy, fifty years after Broodthaers uttered those famously doomed, aspirational words.
* Freely adapted from Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone, A Philosophy of Religion.