Philadelphia-based artist Qualeasha Wood‘s practice contends with the entanglements of digital self-fashioning and Black femmehood. Rife with overlapping windows and pop-ups, webchats, and selfies, her work renders a desktop aesthetic through the language of weaving.
In a new large-scale tapestry, produced in collaboration with The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Wood extends Frantz Fanon’s concept of the zone of nonbeing, in which Black people are denied subjectivity and the status of human. For the artist, the notion of “anywhere but here” speaks to the simultaneity of here and there in digital space, which is marked by the split between the present body and the proliferation of the self through the Internet.
During her FWM residency, Wood and the Studio team experimented with adding layers to her tapestry, different display strategies for monitors, and inviting new planes into the work, including thinking about the wall as a surface. Early prototyping and sketching also explored turning the woven structure into an environment. Ultimately, the artist and Studio focused on intensifying the volume of surface accents, inviting close looking and blurring the viewer’s perception between physical and digital language.
Replete with emojis, cursors, selfies, cropped Renaissance paintings, and avatars from the life simulator game The Sims, anywhere! (but here.) translates the computer interface into a textile with decorative hand-beadwork, rhinestones, and embroidery. Installed atop wallpaper recalling Photoshop’s transparency grid, the textile floats in cyberspace, evoking the artist’s process and the possibility of transformation. Through endless browser tabs, Wood presents an ambivalent site of escape and capture from the world of representation, especially for Black women.
