Lauren Woods
lauren woods is a Dallas-based conceptual artist whose hybrid media projects — film, video and sound installations, public interventions, and site-specific work — engage history as a lens through which to view the sociopolitical nature of the present. Challenging the tradition of documentary/ethnography as objective, woods creates ethno-fictive documents that investigate invisible dynamics in society, remixing memory and imagining other possibilities. She also explores how traditional monument-making can be translated into new contemporary models of commemoration, substituting the traditional marble and granite for new media. In 2013, woods unveiled Drinking Fountain #1, a new media monument to the American Civil Rights Movement, past and present activists/organizers, and the spirit of resistance, installed underneath the remnants of a recently rediscovered Jim Crow “White only” sign in the Dallas County Records Building. Part sculpture, part intervention, the piece is part of the larger public artwork A Dallas Drinking Fountain Project. Having shown internationally throughout her career, woods’s most recent solo exhibition at Zhulong Gallery in Dallas continued her exploration of subject and object through the lens of color with multichannel video and sound interventions that envelope the viewer.
For this Tuesday Evenings presentation, lauren woods shares the work and ideas that have formed her practice.
A video recording of this lectures will be available on the Modern's Youtube