Qualeasha Wood: code_eden

Qualeasha Wood: code_eden explores the vibrant worlds crafted by digital architects — realms that thrive beyond the looking glass and behind the screens of technological devices. Featuring Wood’s textiles, tuftings, and new video works, code_eden transports viewers to the artist’s meta-paradise.

Wood explores ideas of divine intervention and self-determination through imagery of fauna and iconography of virtual and religious sacraments. Wood’s tuftings, such as Into the Blue (2023), visualize the journey of adolescence and introspection through bold colors and pillowy textures. Her digital edens are dynamic spaces where she engages, shapes, and activates her cyber surroundings as “the relational activity” between a person and their environment.

Guest curated by Leandra-Juliet Kelley

In her textile practice, Wood brings together traditional craft techniques and contemporary technology. Her own image acts as a point of departure for works that explore racial, sexual and gender identity as they relate to the Black femme body. As a digital native, Wood deftly navigates an internet environment that is at once a space of celebration and recognition for Black femme figures, as well as a politically loaded site for the ongoing marginalisation and exploitation of their selfhood and culture. Woods’ tapestries combine cybernetic and analogue processes; in her work, a pixel is equivalent to a stitch, each stitch an analogy for the past, present and future of Black femmehood, both on- and off-line, pre- and post-internet.

While Wood’s tapestries blend images from social media with religious, specifically Catholic, iconography, her ‘tuftings’ represent cartoon-like figures that recall the racist caricatures widespread in popular family programmes of the early-mid-20th century and beyond. In them, Wood adopts a naïve aesthetic that calls on the nostalgia of cartoon animations and their association with racial stereotyping to unpack notions of Black girlhood. Despite their formal simplicity, the tuftings reveal a lurking tension drawn from the artist’s own experiences of consuming media rife with anti-Black prejudice throughout her life. Where the tapestries are absorbed in consumption and cyber culture, the tuftings speak to inherited trauma and necessarily implicate accountability in the viewer.

Qualeasha Wood (b. 1996, Long Branch, NJ) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. She received her BA in 2019 from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI and her MA in 2021 from Cranbrook Academy of Fine Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI.

Info: Guest Curator, Leandra-Juliet Kelley, will lead a discussion with artist Qualeasha Wood about her work and her practice, followed by a reception.

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Host or Publisher Rowan University Art Gallery