Filter Photo is pleased to present Recast, a solo exhibition by Vanessa Woods, curated by Allie Haeusslein.
Recast is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, artist books, and sculpture to interrogate the malleability of motherhood. Probing the gaps and conflicts of maternal experience, Woods shows a body turned inside out and remade through her children’s bodies.
Woods' work is highly iterative and shows evidence of being made and remade. Like motherhood itself, the work is continually remixed and rebuilt. Bodies are multiplied and erased through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine, break, grow, shrink, and reassemble to generate spaces of vertigo, ambivalence, and reorientation. Additionally, blank plaster fragments, used throughout the exhibition, function as lacunae—unfilled gaps or intervals—that become the unwritten spaces in which the mother’s identity can be rewritten.
Woods' hybrid approach to image-making in Recast illuminates the pliancy of maternal experience, showcasing how maternal perspective can expand the discourse around identity and gender in contemporary art.
