Chelsey Tyler Wood  Boston, MA

I want to thank you all for your helpful criticism, kind words and honest opinions. I would like to post a statement concerning my intentions. I welcome any further comments and criticism and am open to continuing a dialogue with those interested.

Statement:

The formal narrative of the painting consists of the female nude navigating an environment of cramped wooden crates. The structures are located in a vacant scuffed up room that references a gallery space. For me the bodies within the boxes become art objects. The figures navigate the space within the boxes, both exploring their relationship to the environment and their relationship to each other. Spatially constricted they react both physically and psychologically. Their experiential condition is communicated through the bodies’ expression of color, tension and mark. The bodies are containers themselves, existing within containers, existing within containers, existing within containers and onwards.

As a figurative painter I am repeatedly confronted with the physical and psychological landscape of the female body. My understanding of my own body is influenced and constructed by the shifting social landscape surrounding the female nude. Through self portraiture I have questioned and personalized my relationship to this loaded history, placing my own body into its chronology and creating a collection of visual symbols aimed at expressing my own experience and observations. The practice of painting is developed through muscle memory, observation and repetition. Paintings are ideas created with the body. Paintings are ideas materialized so that one can contemplate the image again and again and again and again. I paint as a way to understand and shape my relationship to the world. I paint as a way to identify and scrutinize the conceptions and misconceptions that I have of myself.