RECAST

Filter Photo is pleased to present Recast, a solo exhibition by Vanessa Woods, curated by Allie Haeusslein. 

Recast is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, artist books, and sculpture to interrogate the malleability of motherhood. Probing the gaps and conflicts of maternal experience, Woods shows a body turned inside out and remade through her children’s bodies.

Woods' work is highly iterative and shows evidence of being made and remade. Like motherhood itself, the work is continually remixed and rebuilt. Bodies are multiplied and erased through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine, break, grow, shrink, and reassemble to generate spaces of vertigo, ambivalence, and reorientation. Additionally, blank plaster fragments, used throughout the exhibition, function as lacunae—unfilled gaps or intervals—that become the unwritten spaces in which the mother’s identity can be rewritten. 

Woods' hybrid approach to image-making in Recast illuminates the pliancy of maternal experience, showcasing how maternal perspective can expand the discourse around identity and gender in contemporary art.

About the Artist

Vanessa Woods is a San Francisco 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. Since graduating with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, her work has been exhibited throughout the United States including Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and The Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. Woods has received numerous awards including a Center for Photographic Art Artist Support Grant, a Film Arts Foundation Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute's MFA Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at Djerassi, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Her work has been published in The New York Times and Harpers, among others. Woods lives in Pacifica, CA with artist Josh Smith and their three children. She is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in SF.