Jack Fischer Gallery is pleased to present lacuna, a solo exhibition of new work by Vanessa Woods. 

Lacuna is Woods’ first exhibition in the gallery to feature 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional works including photographs, collages, casts, and plaster sculptures that interrogate the malleability of motherhood. In lacuna, Woods shows a body turned inside out and remade through her children’s bodies while also probing the gaps and conflicts of maternal experience.

“The range of visual strategies used in lacuna is meant to generate spaces of vertigo, confusion, ambivalence, and reorientation,” says Woods of the exhibition. “I want the work to speak to the extraordinary fact that the maternal body and mind are physically and biologically remade through the process of becoming a mother. I also want to explore the conflicts that live within maternal experience; the need to simultaneously hold on to and let go of my children, to extend my body to them and reclaim it for myself. Fracture and repair are recurring motifs in the show. Like kintsugi—the Japanese art of mending broken pottery and leaving the crack visible—I feel that the fracture of self that occurs in motherhood allows us to be remade stronger and more beautiful.”

The work in lacuna is highly iterative and shows evidence of being made and remade. Like motherhood itself, the work is continually remixed and rebuilt. Bodies are multiplied and erased through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine, break, grow, shrink, and reassemble. Blank plaster fragments, used as sculptural elements throughout the exhibition, function as lacunae—unfilled gaps or intervals—that become the unwritten spaces in which the mother’s identity can be rewritten. Woods’ hybrid approach to image-making in lacuna illuminates the pliancy of maternal experience, showcasing how maternal perspective can expand the discourse around identity and gender in contemporary art.

Related Exhibition Programming:
Woods in conversation with Allie Haeusslein, Director Pier 24 Photography
When: Saturday, June 29, 1:30-2:30 PM
Where: Jack Fischer Gallery
1275 Minnesota Street
San Francisco, CA 94107
RSVP: jackfischer@sbcglobal.net

About the Artist
Vanessa Woods (b. 1979, San Diego, CA) is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist working in photography, 16mm film, collage, and sculpture. Her work uses a range of visual strategies and a hybrid approach to image-making to explore discourse around identity, motherhood, and gender in contemporary art. Since graduating with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, her artwork and films have been exhibited throughout the United States including Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and The Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. Woods has received numerous awards including a Center for Photographic Art Artist Support Grant, a Film Arts Foundation Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute's MFA Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at Djerassi, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Woods lives in Pacifica, CA with artist Josh Smith and their three children.