In October, only a few short months ago, I was invited to Ketchum/Hailey/Sun Valley, Idaho to do a project about tourism (specifically as it relates to Sun Valley) and the American road trip with the Sun Valley Center for the Arts. I was there for nine days, visiting local cultural institutions and sites, hiking, camping, wandering the grounds of the tiny Sun Valley resort, and getting swallowed up by the Trailing of the Sheep Festival, all of which was really enjoyable and charming and strange. My hosts were fun and gracious and felt like old friends right away.

When I got home I spent the next couple of months (around my day job) making twelve paintings to send back for the exhibition. Here are a few (they're all 3x5 inches or so, the size of vintage postcards):

Now the show, Wish You Were Here, is up. I wish I could see it, but I love the sense of it I get from this excellent video they produced (embedded below), and I couldn't be prouder of the company I'm in. Check it!

A drawing that will begin its flight tomorrow toward the poet who commissioned it. 10 x 11 inches, ink on paper.

 

I really hope its new owner likes it; it always feels a very serious thing to create for someone who has entrusted me with creative license...

I had a second opening this week. (It's been a busy time leading up to it all!)  This is a solo show in Albuquerque, currently up and running at Small Engine Gallery, through September 28th. Small Engine is a sweet space run by very cool people.

The Show, Among the Final Thunders of These Ices, features the larger Arctic paintings and drawings I've been working on this summer, plus a few small studies.

My friends Juan and Sharon played a couple of sets for the opening. I would have come just to hear them! I'm hypnotized by their music and grateful that they so willingly gave the reception a beating heart. Thanks, guys.



Reception Clip from wood on Vimeo.

This week I traveled to West Virginia University, where I'm lucky enough to be in a two-person exhibition with my pal and fellow painter Beau Carey.

Fathom Out postcard

The show looked great.

The talk was well-attended.

And we were generally treated like rock stars. It was a perfect experience all around. Big thanks to everyone at WVU for their exceptional graciousness and generosity.

 

They made this phenomenal poster to advertise our lecture! (Thanks Michael Sherwin for the photo)

For an upcoming show, I decided to try some large pieces in graphite.

Part of the Ship, 26.5 x 40 inches

The above drawing is based on documentation of a performance that took place on board our ship, Antigua, during the Arctic Circle residency. My friend and collaborator Christy Georg is a master of knotwork, and she helped me tie myself into this configuration.

  

Gullybreen, 40 x 26.5 inches

Below is a detail from Gullybreen, seen above.

Three larger Arctic paintings, finished this summer. All acrylic on panel.

Eclipse, 20 x 30 inches

Circling the Ice, 25 x 50 inches

Stowaways, 20 x 30 inches

I documented my Arctic journal before it went to join its predecessors at the Center for Art + Environment. My camera apparently only records for ten minutes at a time--which I only found out later when I reviewed the footage--but that was enough to have gotten most of the good stuff in, anyway. :)

Arctic Journal. 2012 from wood on Vimeo.

Lots of things are happening; more on that later, but for the moment, two links.

One: This really nice article about my recent travel and work, by the excellent Michael Abatemarco of Pasatiempo (Santa Fe New Mexican).

Two: the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe has done a cool thing in creating online galleries for its Alcove shows. I'm especially glad to have their installation shots.

That Sound Under the Floor Is the Sea opened earlier this month at the Harwood (and will continue to run through April 25th). Here's the press release summary:

During Wood’s art-centric travels above the Arctic Circle in September-November 2012, she amassed more than two hundred pages of journal entries, sketches, and studies of polar and subpolar environments. The exhibition is a unique window (or porthole, in this case) into the process of creative research: Wood’s journal will be on display alongside loose-leaf studies, photographs, works on paper, documentation of performance work in the field; the first finished works to result from the journey; and in-progress drafts for upcoming work.

Felt great to see so many things I'd been imagining come together. I was happy with the colors and wall text. We built those angled shelves from scratch, recessing one so we could display the journal (and a digital frame cycling through photographs of the pages) in the open, but not in a way that invited people to flip through it much.

One of the things I was especially excited to show were a couple of etchings that the excellent Frol Boundin encouraged me to make, and then generously printed for me:

I enjoyed attempting to curate the field notes and painting drafts in such a way that they'd get at the spirit of the places I splashed around in.

Coming up, just a month from today:

Lots of preparations to do. I'm building shelves and thinking about layout....

The new year has been sort of a big one, already!

I finished the series of small Svalbard paintings I began earlier this winter, ending up with seventeen. Here are a few of my favorites:

And! As it happened, they were finished just in time to be included in the current Alcove exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art (which will be up through February 24th).

The Alcove shows are "a series of nine exhibitions at the Museum of Art highlighting work by outstanding New Mexico artists."

The curator chose to exhibit fourteen of the small Arctic paintings, and a few drawings resulting from my travels in Australia last summer.

The reception was January 18th...

 
And then I talked on January 25th.

All quite exciting!

More tiny paintings to recap the trip--I'm working on a series of 16.

Each is acrylic on panel, 2.5 by 3.5 inches.