For Qualeasha Wooden, a glitch may be good. In her newest solo present at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, the Philly-based artist delves into the glitch as aesthetic and a language for shifting by a world the place selfhood is continually mediated and warped. Balancing digital disenchantment with an optimistic eye, Wooden places a spin on physique horror conventions in her newest physique of labor, composed of tapestries, tuftings and video.
In Malware, jacquard tapestries flip digital pixels into hand-stitched poetry. Lit by the white-blue glow of a pc display, Wooden emblazons her signature webcam self-portraits with confessions of burnout and on-line overexposure, taking the type of Python and Java script. Her movies give this code a second life, utilizing it to pixelate and datamosh her physique out of recognition.
Transferring into the gallery, her tufted works floor us in reminiscence, putting viewers within the delicate domesticity of her grandmother’s home. In these moments, she explores the slippage between life on-line and “AFK” (away from keyboard), weaving collectively reminiscence distortion, innocence and themes of girlhood.
“Like a pc virus, [a glitch] infiltrates and corrupts techniques, but it surely additionally creates new pathways, rewriting frameworks and forging new potentialities,” the gallery wrote. Wooden embraces this duality, drawing a parallel to Black femme identities that are all too usually “pathologized as errors or disruptions” within the eyes of the identical techniques that eat them.
“Throughout Wooden’s follow, paranoia and nervousness multiply as she regularly asks what it means to exist inside techniques that see you as each product and downside, important character and menace.”
Malware is now on view in London by April 26.
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
6 Heddon St,
London W1B 4BT,
United Kingdom
