NADA Miami 2020

Kendra Jayne Patrick is pleased to debut Qualeasha Wood’s newest works for NADA Miami Beach (in New York) 2020, high-contrast tufted wool and acrylic pieces that continue the artist’s thoughts about the relationship between the avatar and the self. Here, Wood composes her ideas on the subject by means more manual and personal than the ones she uses to make her seminal tapestry works.

While the tapestries are weaved by a powerful machine and depict social media-esque self portraits of the artist that are hundreds of Photoshop layers deep, Wood applies each individual thread to the tufted works by hand. The result of such a physical, analog process (underlined by the fact that the larger works are taller than Wood herself, who is quite petite) is a depiction of a less literal self and a more literal interpretation of blackness-as-experience. Evocative of MS Paint doodles, Betye Saar’s, “Black Girl’s Window,” DIY Pinterest, and Ebecho Muslimova’s “Fatebe” drawings, these works feel like the young artist’s most personal field notes on an endlessly disquieting year.