Chelsey Wood
Region: Northeast
As a figurative painter I am repeatedly confronted with the physical and psychological landscape of the female body. My understanding of my own body is influenced and constructed by the shifting social landscape surrounding the female nude. Through self-portraiture I have questioned and personalized my relationship to this loaded history, placing my own body into its chronology and creating a collection of visual symbols aimed at expressing my own experience and observations.
The formal narrative of the painting consists of the female nude navigating an environment of cramped wooden crates. The structures are located in a vacant scuffed up room that references a gallery space. For me the bodies within the boxes become art objects. The figures navigate the space within the boxes, both exploring their relationship to the environment and their relationship to each other. Spatially constricted they react both physically and psychologically. Their experiential condition is communicated through the bodies‚ the expression of color, tension and mark. The bodies are containers themselves, existing within containers, existing within containers, existing within containers and so on.
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