B.O. Jack Arthur Wood
In a garden, I kick at a cobblestone path. I ignore the other children and move toward my favorite plant. My licking leaf tree. I pull one of the leaves away and raise it to my mouth like a question. I turn it over, feeling the hairy side with my thumb as I run my tongue over the back of the leaf until it is floppy and creased, relishing the magic of sensation, absorbing fascination through my mouth and fingertips. Having always explored my world sensorially, I build spaces of color, light and material through multilayered painted and collaged surfaces.
The nature of things is more or less based on a binary. In my work I explore the inseparable combination of anxiety and joy I feel while anticipating the nature of things oscillating between two points, visualizing a way that binary space can be punctured and trespassed. Paint becomes an object when I cut from the cloth or page allowing me to try endless placements. Working symmetrically means each mark becomes conversational, and the subject or figure can
rest behind the static. All of the swatches affixed to my paintings and installations bring the body and mind into question as structures of bondage. I imagine the compulsively wrapped and strapped edges of my paintings as corporeal and contemplative armatures that hold spectral displays inside, visions of transcendence, clarity through chroma.
JAW
Artist Bio
Born, 1990 in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States
Jack Arthur Wood Jr. is a visual artist, writer, curator and educator based in Ridgewood, Queens. Wood studied at Guilford College, in Greensboro, NC, receiving a BA in printmaking in 2012, and earned an MFA in printmaking from Texas A&M University — Corpus Christi in 2017. Wood received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in painting in 2024. He has been a resident at The Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The Wassaic Project, The Jentel Foundation, Little Bear Hill, and Tiger Lily Press. Wood has had solo / two-person presentations at Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York, NY; My Pet Ram, New York, NY; Conduit Gallery, Ridgewood, NY; His work has been exhibited at Chozick Family Gallery, New York, NY; Chart, New York, NY; Geary Contemporary, Millerton, NY; The Wassaic Project, Wassaic, NY; Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; 5-50 Gallery, Queens, NY; Field of Play Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, NY; No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH; Heaven Gallery, Chicago,IL. He currently teaches at Montclair State University, in New Jersey.