Window Dressing XXXI: Ariel Wood
Image: Taylor Holland, German Neo-Rococo Naturalistic Style (1840-1850), Gold leaf, wood, paint, composite, 2014.
Exhibition Dates: Oct.30– Nov. 6th, 2023 (visible 24 hours/day)
Artist Reception: Friday, November.3 2023, 7-9pm
Ariel Wood (b. 1994, Pasadena, CA) is a Texas-based artist by way of California and Wisconsin. They received a BFA in printmaking and drawing from The University of Wisconsin, Madison 2016, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from Santa Reparata International School Of Art, in Florence 2016, and their MFA in Sculpture from The University of Texas at Austin 2022, where they were a recipient of the Lomis Slaughter, Jr. Endowment Scholarship In Sculpture and the Continuing College Fellowship. In 2022, Wood attended Watershed Ceramics’ Summer Residency and in 2023, they were a finalist for the Alice C. Cole Fellowship. Ariel Wood is a sculpture artist, educator, and member of MASS Gallery. They have exhibited their work nationally and internationally in Wisconsin, Illinois, Texas, New York, and Florence, Italy.
In their practice, Ariel Wood makes objects and structures evoking plumbing and drainage. This system of infrastructure is inherently physical as it is political. Fluidity is indelibly controlled by gravity and requires the utmost connection between parts. Structures and spaces of drainage and plumbing often control and direct the human bodies that encounter them, as much as they purport to assist them. This mix of physical materiality and sociopolitical pressures gives drainage infrastructure an implicit set of relationships that Wood works to manipulate, emphasize, and transgress.
In this current body of work, Wood explores the stormwater infrastructure systems known as detention basins. These cement depressions in the ground are often found by highways, large parking lots, and tucked away in residential areas. They speak to a “last-ditch” effort as they are built purely to move large quantities of runoff away from areas prone to flooding. They do not hold the water and let it filter back into the groundwater the way retention basins do. They simply collect it, slow down its speed, and move it away. Retain is to “[imply] continued keeping” and detain is to “suggest a delay in letting go.” as defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary.
In To Suggest A Delay, Wood represents the detention basin right beside the Canopy parking lot in drawn, lithographic form, and three dimensionally in insulation foam and papier-mâché clay. Providing both a bird’s-eye view and an aerial view, the works are icons of the thing itself, about 500 ft away.
