Contact Sheet 193: Suné Woods

Los Angeles-based artist Suné Woods creates multi-channel video installations, photographs, sculpture, and collage. Her practice examines absences and vulnerabilities within cultural and social histories. She also uses microcosmal sites such as the family to understand the larger sociological phenomenon, imperialist mechanisms, and formations of knowledge. She is interested in how language is emotively expressed, guarded and translated through the absence and presence of the physical body.

To Sleep With Terra includes photo-collage and works on paper that explore Wood’s ongoing interest in creating her own topographies, gleaned from science, travel, and geographic magazines and books of the past fifty years. The collage work explores the social phenomena that indoctrinate brutality and the ways in which propaganda and exploitation have employed photography.

Woods has said of her artistic journey, “Collage seemed the best way for me to articulate all the complicated sensations that were arising for me while processing these streamed documentations of violence, ecology, and a desire to understand more deeply how seemingly disparate things relate when they are mashed up in a visual conversation.”

This catalogue includes an essay by Light Work’s associate director Mary Lee Hodgens.

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Suné Woods has participated in residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Light Work. Woods has received awards from the Visions from the New California Initiative, as well as The John Gutmann Fellowship Award, and The Baum Award for an Emerging American Photographer. She has exhibited her work at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Lowe Art Museum, Miami, and The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2010 and is currently Visiting Faculty at Vermont College of Fine Art.