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| Details: | This February, KEEP Contemporary presents a solo exhibition for Santa Fe painter Holly Wood, whose subject matter is inspired by daily life, news stories, history, politics, and the artist’s own vivid dreams. Wood’s surreal, storybook style paintings for Realtime/Dreamtime blend these elements according to themes that relate to human nature and environmental concerns. The exhibition opens with a reception on Friday, February 19th from 5-8pm; the gallery will operate at 25% capacity and facemasks are required.
“The title, Realtime/Dreamtime is descriptive of how my ideas come to me,” explains Wood. “I process what I see from daily life and history and that is distilled into images – or sometimes just titles – which will pop into my head either in waking life or in vivid dreams.”
This creative process allows Wood to explore many themes through her work. For Realtime/Dreamtime, Wood’s concern for the environment and humanity’s impact on our plant is a dominant subject, featured in works like Resort, which comments on rising ocean levels and the resulting perilous state of coastal cities. Other paintings in the show imagine an idyllic world where “humans learn their place as equals among other beings.” This imagery features a mix of animals and human characters playing parts of equal importance or even swapping roles. “I want to put the observer in a place where they are made to consider things that may never have occurred to them,” says the artist.
Wood’s stylistic influences include medieval narrative art, Japanese art, and the cartoon-like story-telling styles of ancient Indian, Egyptian and Mughal art. “Like them, and like the illustrators and cartoonists of the Golden Age, I want to tell my stories with the most economical and expressive use of line, color and texture,” she says.
While Wood attended Pratt Institute in New York City for two years, she is largely self-taught and learned to paint from books and observation. She has lived in Santa Fe since 1969, but renewed her focus as a professional painter in 2007. Exhibition paintings for Realtime/Dreamtime span the last decade of Wood’s career, giving the exhibition a retrospective feel. |
| Event is: | Daily | | Audience: | All Welcome | | Category: | Arts and Entertainment | | Submitted by: | contributed |
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