Opening Reception, KATE WOOD: VARIATIONS ON A THEME

Born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and now living with her family in a rural mountain village on the High Road to Taos, Wood is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily in painting, illustration, and paper mache sculpture. She considers herself a play-based artist, and her work explores themes of relationship, family, body language, communication, and the point at which personal experience transcends identity and becomes collective consciousness. Story and artifact are central to her artistic practice, which employs a cast of glyphs rooted in archetype and mythology to construct visual narratives that invite viewers to find their own stories reflected in the work.

Wood’s work in Variations on a Theme is an expansion of her recent series of paintings, A really good date I-IV, which explore the idea of platonic intimacy through a sequence of interactions taking place between two dog-like figures. “I’ve been thematically curious about the bounds and limits of closeness and connection, and what shape intimacy can take outside the constructs of romantic relationship,” the artist says. Her new work deepens this original exploration, isolating five pairs of dogs from the original series to illustrate what can develop from a single interaction. The resulting 26 new paintings rendered in ink and gouache are pattern-based mutations of the original pairing that, for Wood, express the infinite potential of human encounter, relationship, and love.