St Louis, MO
3/21/15 11:01 AM
A musician friend of mine used to comment on the quality of the individual instruments in whatever it was we were listening to. I couldn’t hear the guitar if I tried, only the overall pop song. With Ken Wood’s prints it’s different: my eyes thrill to discern one large, smooth sky blue gesture from the taupe and grey ones layered over and under it, to notice the loopy black grid with its jazzy Mondrian-esque infills that recurs in another print, upside down, amid brushy rusty swoops. It’s as if Wood is testing out what happens when this shape and that color and this gesture, when that shape and this color and that gesture, come together: like human figures, but without the baggage, they alternately sit on one another’s laps, dance languidly, collide with incipient bruising or just lounge around, relaxing. Sometimes three’s a crowd, and Wood removes this gesture or kicks out that shape, but in the best of times, each is copacetic with the other.
—Lori Waxman