Whether Krist Wood’s approach of is pure, or metaphorically pure, in his works of art, they are in the positive sense of the word traditional while in the field of new internet technologies. He is a Renaissance man who works in the fields of fine arts, poetry, music, but also science. He currently works at Harvard and completed his doctoral studies at the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University. On the internet, Wood has been artistically active since the 1990s and is the founder of the important platforms such as Computers Club and Begin Records.
One of his most visible creative lines is a minimalist web site with digitally painted images featuring sensual scenes of highly idealized landscapes occupying a space somewhere halfway between dreams, the internet, and maybe some other place. In addition, these spaces are often engraved with interlinking and populated by Wood himself, whether in the form of a character, mirror, or wildcard representations. A pearly rainbow spectator participative identity emerges, beginning somewhere in the flow of a naive surfer’s experience, ending in the tickled neglected paths and ditches that we associate with our supposed virtual bodies and limbs. Wood uses virtual reality like Bastien in the second, unfilmed part of the Neverending Story, in which, carried by his wishes, he creates new worlds.
The work Vulv, from 2014, could be included in a series of videos and images of mysterious landscapes of idealized landscapes with enigmatic lighting effects such as Akhiishm iii, (2014), Siid (2012) or Siirm Aeruah (2012-13). In an artificial, abstract gallery room, where the image from which he flows out is levitating, he climbs out and all light of the color specturm flows into him in a vulva-like shape, which could equally well be an expression of asexual disembodiment in the suffocating vacuum of virtuality, a self-ironic demonstration of the fetishism of content of a long since trimmed artistic works which have been reduced to a screensaver.
Barbora Trnková
The exhibition is organized in cooperation with PAF – Festival of Film Animation and Contemporary Art, Olomouc, Czech Republic, and from Dec 7th to Dec 10th 2017 will be presented at physical premises as part of the festival programme. Details at www.pifpaf.cz.
