Joint Mini show featuring Matthew Wood and Michelle Gonzales

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Statement from Michelle Gonzales

This body of work reflects an amalgam of family history and fragmented memory. I reference personal photographs, Texas flora and elements of my innate Mexican-American culture as a means to reclaim and preserve the threads of my own ancestry.

My process resonates with the way I physically and metaphorically interlace my materials and ideas. I stitch various fabrics together as a symbolic gesture of connecting a memory to a history. Sewing and stretching creates an inherent unpredictability that reveals the complexities and imperfections of a nebulous recollection. I paint over warps and buckles of the fabric with family photographs and vague memories. Eliminated and embellished imagery alludes to fabricated stories distorted by time, discrepancy of individualized perspectives, or the lack of storytelling.

By painting from photographs and fracturing the composition, I consider the contrast of belonging to something and nothing at the same time. I attempt to navigate my place within my ancestry against a forgotten legacy. As I reconstruct a history, my work begins to occupy a liminal space of illusion and reality; erasure and recovery; celebration and separation; the known and unknown.

About Matthew Wood

Originally a painter, Dallas-based artist Matthew “Woody” Wood first began exploring alternative mediums in the 1990s. Drawing inspiration from works that forego the inclusion of brushwork or human touch, Woody works with a rare vintage paper, Chroma Rama, in order to produce multi-dimensional works that eclipse the appearance of the artist’s hand in their creation. Utilizing an in-depth process of photographing pedestrians’ shadows and manipulating the resulting images, Woody created his own visual language of abstract forms to employ in his
work.

These explorations in abstract shapes form the basis of Woody’s “Biomorphagrams”, which are multi-layered constructions that blur the line between static form and fluid process. Existing somewhere in the space between two-dimensional and three-dimensional, his work is deeply influenced by the twofold art historical context of realism and abstraction while drawing on both past and present pop culture for inspiration. In playing with the ideas of dimension, genre, and dual cultural concepts, Woody imbues his work with the definitive ambition of working contemporary artists: creating works that are ultimately timeless.