louder than the sum of its parts – Opening Reception

Working in printmaking, sound and sculpture, Amanda Wood uses strategies of abstraction, translation, and volume to tease out material structures found in both the built environment and the natural world. She breaks down images, finds patterns through repetition and close looking, and then rearranges this data into new patterns and forms.

louder than the sum of its parts takes the halftone patterns created from photographing urban landscapes and combines them with the forms, lines, and clusters made by swarms of birds in flight. Wood finds the smallest piece of information – the bitmap or the outline of a bird and places it within an exploration of common materials and traditional practices. Her continuous translation and rearrangement of the singular highlights the physicality and universality of the pattern language that emerges from manipulating visual information in this way. In keeping with her commitment to material exploration, Wood’s current body of work investigates and expands perception through the senses of hearing, touch, and sight. Adapting the processes of hand weaving and screen printing to a digital framework through data sonification, she is interested in the interplay between the invisible and the material.

BIO

Amanda Wood (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary artist from the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) nations (Vancouver, BC) who works among and in between several different media including print making, and hand weaving. She navigates the world through a practice that is based in repetition, tactile sensations, and data sonification.

This way of working makes space for both hyperfocus and shifts in directions. Amanda calls this process, translanguage sequencing. A translanguage is an intra-lingual means of communication. It can be a mash up of multiple languages or the creation of a language specific to a situation or person. In mathematical terms, a sequence is a collection of objects where the order matters and repetition is allowed. A translanguage sequence is a combination of these things – an approach dependent on arbitrary repetition, common materials, everyday experience, and the collapsing of time.

Amanda is grateful for support from the BC Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts. She currently works out of Malaspina Printmakers Society in Vancouver BC.

The gallery will be open Saturdays from 12-4pm and by appointment with an opening reception on May 2 from 7-10pm