Elegant Thorn Review: Brian Wood

Sunday, April 5, 2009

Brian Wood - Three Images

I am honored to host three images from a well-known and amazingly talented artist -Brian Wood. Rather than try to do his biography justice on my own, I will include a portion from his site and allow readers to go read the rest if they so choose - the added benefit to me in this is the inclusion of two more images.

All the links here take you to his main page where you can explore the various galleries of his art.

Brian Wood: Introduction to the Artist and the Work

Brian Wood is an artist working with multiple media in New York City. His paintings, drawings, prints, and photographs are exhibited internationally and are held in private and public collections.

Wood is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum; the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts; the Tampa Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa; the Museum of Fine Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and Concordia Art Gallery in Montreal; the Museum of Modern Art in Prague; the Ludwig Museum in Cologne; and many others.

Brian Wood’s awards include the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship for printmaking and photography, the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship,
the New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, a number of Canada Council Grants, and the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. He currently teaches at Hunter College in New York and previously taught at Yale University.

Wood uses multiple media to foreground differing awareness in his ongoing exploration of consciousness. He uses different media to both stimulate and respond to various states of mind and multiple levels of thought. The literal is dissolved through metaphor and illusion. Just as trauma can imagine itself into ecstasy, these works transform matter, body, and mind through imagination. Rooted in our biological ground, Wood’s pieces are markers on the shifting borders of self and world.
Brian Wood uses painting, drawing, printmaking, and photography. Each medium allows different spatial and material illusions and each offers a different experience of time.