Augusta Wood

Augusta Wood follow American, born 1978

Lives in Los Angeles, California, United States

Projects/Portfolios

The Shape of My Head

Introduction

In The Shape of My Head, Augusta Wood investigates the experience of personal time as an excursive set of fluid impressions and residual lingerings, each moment of the present informed by the spectral simultaneity of the past. This living overlap is the source of Wood’s nuanced commix of images, where tenses are flexible, and the cumulative superimposition of imagery displaces the linear dictates of chronological time.

Interested in the inherent elisions that emerge from within the photograph as an innately apparitional and mnemonic record, Wood explores its recomposition, engaging the subjective nature of time and memory, in all its latency and perceptual instability, as intimate extensions of the self and its way of seeing. In The Shape of My Head, Wood has traced the edges of her daily life in film, shooting photographs of its interiors, exteriors, vantage points, and objects at different times of day and year, accumulating partial, though intimate, views of its contours. Capturing the shifts in atmosphere and light that both animate these circadian textures and stir the indeterminacy of their shadows, Wood confronts the passing of time as a uniquely fractured and digressive experience rather than a reliably quantifiable one.

Wood’s process dramatizes this intuited and perceived dimension of time in its evocative conflation of past and present, projecting and superimposing photographs from multiple places and moments into a single compressed surface in real space. She uses slide projectors to cast a manifold of transparencies onto darkened studio walls, in what becomes a performative and transitory opening of multiple temporal windows in tandem, allowing the individual frames to interact dimensionally and produce unexpected aggregates. Often intervening in the image herself, Wood uses her own body and hands to enter the collage, blocking out areas of light physically. She photographs this solitary theater of shadows, arresting its most evocative compositions as they unfurl in the overlap and restructuring of her film.

Wood captures her impressions of time as a lived and embodied extension of the self in The Shape of My Head. Beyond language and the discursive coherence of chronology, its passing emerges as the artful and powerfully unreliable architect of experience.

view all 14

I have only what I remember

Introduction

view all 13

Whether it happened or not

Introduction

“When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not.”

-Mark Twain

'Whether it happened or not' is a series of compositions made entirely of projected slides. The works draw from a second pass through the artist’s enormous archive of family photographs, and incorporate pictures she continues to make in the New England school-house-turned-home where she spent the first 17 years of her life. Wood’s interest lies in photographing the present, using the past to describe a cumulative history that is the present. She arranges photographic space from both old photographs and newly authored images to understand a visual and personal history as it influences her perception today. 'Whether it happened or not' is an act of organizing chaos and composing a view that asserts the way things exist in the artist’s mind. These are works that reflect what she remembers and wants to stabilize, complete, and believes should be not be forgotten. Wood is resisting loss. This happened, this is real, these images exist now, whether it happened or not.

The range of her archive contains an overwhelming amount of information in the form of small transparent rectangles of life: parties, portraits, pets, artworks, piles of books, birthdays, holidays, furniture, renovations, storage, boxes, windows, landscapes, and empty rooms. The artist’s father and mother made most of the oldest photographs, along with some made by visitors and other unknown authors. Wood has also discovered her own images in the family archive, made in the house as a child with her first film cameras. Over the past ten years Wood has revisited the house to photograph both what persists of the past and what has changed. The archive continues to grow – but more slowly now. This work is in a sense collaborative, an accumulation and an expression of a subjective construction. Wood stakes a claim in her choice of which images to put together, defining her own memory and the potency of it.

'Whether it happened or not' evolved out of her previous body of work, 'I have only what I remember'. The use of slide projection continues in the current body of work, though the intentions and process are independent. 'Whether it happened or not' is made exclusively in the studio using the traces of a history marked out through lived spaces. It relies on images from film projected to reconstitute what otherwise could not be seen and articulated. New images coalesce with old to examine the idiosyncrasies and slippage of memory that define experience. The present contains the past and the future wouldn’t exist without either – building artwork that lives in the present and not allowing some ideas to slip into the dark.

view all 12

Art Photo Index Info

All PDFs

Collections

Alerts

About Art Photo Index

FAQs

Organizations Included

Email Us

505.988.5152 x111

Projects/Portfolios

Publications

Statements

Biography

Website

Contact