Qualeasha Wood: code_anima

Curated by Leandra-Juliet Kelley

Qualeasha Wood: code_anima explores identity, physical and digital boundaries, and the process of individuation through analysis of complex and socially accepted paradoxes. Defined as "an individual's true inner self," anima serves as a leitmotif in Wood’s introspective work, which examines the archetypes found within physical and digital societies. As the artist states, "This body of work draws inspiration from the concept of *deus ex machina* — a narrative device that introduces an unexpected, external force to resolve a complex situation. This device allows us to highlight the paradoxical position of Black women in society — cast simultaneously as both saviors and scapegoats within a white supremacist framework."

Wood's technical skills are evident in the digital collages of her tapestries as well as the colorful scenes of her hand-made tuftings. The materiality of these textiles (the warp and weft) are embedded with a "code," serving as a symbol for the inner workings of the dual experiences felt by Black people, particularly Black women, as well as the multifaceted online identities that mirror or oppose our physical existence.

For Wood, "code_anima delves into the complexities of identity, expectation, and erasure through the prisms of race, gender, and sexuality. This exhibition is a critical examination of the roles historically ascribed to Black women, which demand both a resolution to systemic issues and the simultaneous stripping of personal autonomy and agency."

Qualeasha Wood (b. 1996 Long Branch, New Jersey) is a textile artist whose work contemplates realities around black female embodiment that do and might exist. Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, queer craft, Microsoft Paint, and internet avatars, Wood's tufted and tapestry pieces mesh traditional craft and contemporary technological materials. She navigates both an Internet environment saturated in Black Femme figures and culture and a political and economic environment holding that embodiment at the margins. Like the vast majority of her age-peers, Wood has operated one mortal and multiple digital avatars since pre-adolescence. For her, intuitive combinations of analog and cybernetic compositional processes make for a contemporary exploration of Black American Femme ontology.

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 programs of the early-mid-20th century and beyond. The tuftings have a distinctly different visual style from the artist’s tapestry pieces. 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 cyberculture, the tuftings speak to inherited trauma and necessarily implicate accountability in the viewer.

Wood has exhibited at The Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Hauser and Wirth (New York, Los Angeles, and Somerset, UK), Kendra Jayne Patrick (New York), Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, (London), Cooper Cole (Toronto), New Image Art (Los Angeles), and more. Her work is held in institutional collections, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as international private collections. Wood lives and works in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, and is represented by Gallery Kendra Jayne Patrick and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.

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