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The People’s Choice Award: Micah Wood
75: Micah Wood
Create a new series of paintings about the body, gender, and identity
Micah Wood is an artist living and working in Vermont. He works in a variety of media including painting, sculpture and performance. The imagery found throughout Wood’s work oscillates between found images and advertising to automatic drawings and observational sketches. Wood’s paintings lie at the nexus of abstraction and figuration and seek to create a distinctive vision of his environment.
Project description
My project is about creating a series of paintings during a planned art residency. The main focus of this residency will be to push myself to explore a new body of work that deals with gender, the body, identity, and materials. During the art residency, I will be responding to space as well as slowing down and allowing myself to experiment with different materials and processes. This slowing down will result in uncharted territory for me. Having the resources and time are essential for artists to create new work. As a teaching artist, I am around art all day but I hardly ever have the time that I would like to spend in the studio. With the funds from this grant, I will be able to realize a reality that I could not otherwise imagine. This body of work will be a series of paintings that mark a new direction in my work by exploring how digital images and paintings can coexist. These hybrid paintings will be based around how gender norms are a thing of the past while bringing forward a more nuanced look at the body. By using digital imagery combined with acrylic and oil paints, I will create something new to me, formally speaking.
This body of work will be hybrid paintings that will challenge the viewer both formally and conceptually to think about what a painting can do. By combining photography and painting, I hope to have the viewer question the very idea of what a painting is. Conceptually, the body of work will be about the body, gender, and identity which are themes the audience I believe will relate to.
There will be an exhibition of these paintings that will be free and open to the public.
“Italian Mushrooms”
“Untitled”
“The Shave”
August 23, 2023