Vanessa Woods: Recast

Vanessa Woods: Recast by Barbara CiurejMay 28, 2025

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Bloom, 2025. ©Vanessa Woods

Psychic and physical edginess permeates Vanessa Woods’ arresting work, Recast, on view at Filter Photo Chicago. Her meticulously executed photographic collages and sculptural objects embody the unmaking and remaking of the self through the maternal experience.

In disorienting reconstructions, Woods uses a vocabulary of bodily forms that repeat in variations, reflecting the repetitive and often confining aspects of nurturing. But it is in these tight spaces where Woods’ work opens to possibility. In surreal juxtapositions, limbs float, bodies merge, time and space dissolve. Plaster casts of her children’s hands record time tenderly and also look like stark fragments from classical antiquity. Organic shapes obliterate but can be openings. There is an austerity in the black and white presentation that abstracts rather than sentimentalizes. The installation, curated by Allie Haeusslein, extends the work into sculptural assemblages where pedestals and objects cast shadows and layered imagery spills into space.

Woods’ work calls us back to the embodiment of the deep work of caring for others and the interdependence that shapes us.

Recast is on view at Filter Photo Chicago until June 21, 2025.

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Vestiges 44, 2023. ©Vanessa Woods

Recast

Recast is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms, photographic collages, artist books, and sculpture to interrogate the malleability of motherhood. In Recast, I show a body turned inside out and remade through my children’s bodies, while also probing the gaps and conflicts of maternal experience.

The work in Recast is highly iterative and shows evidence of being made and remade. Like motherhood itself, the work is continually remixed and rebuilt. Bodies are multiplied and erased through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine, break, grow, shrink, and reassemble to generate spaces of vertigo, ambivalence, and reorientation. Additionally, blank plaster fragments, used throughout the work, function as lacunae—unfilled gaps or intervals—that become the unwritten spaces in which my identity can be rewritten.

My hybrid approach to image-making in Recast illuminates the pliancy of maternal experience, showcasing how maternal perspective can expand the discourse around identity and gender in contemporary art.

My collages, photographs, and sculptures utilize disparate associations to re-imagine and re-contextualize contemporary and historical narratives. In each piece that I create, the original image is decontextualized through a range of visual strategies, and its meaning re-contextualized through new associations. In my current work, I use the birth of my children as the genesis for an expansive project exploring the maternal body and the conditions of motherhood. – Vanessa Woods

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Rconfigure, 2025. ©Vanessa Woods

Vanessa Woods is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist working in photography, 16mm film, collage, and sculpture. Her work uses a range of visual strategies and a hybrid approach to image-making to explore discourse around identity, motherhood, and gender in contemporary art. Since graduating with an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, her work has been exhibited throughout the United States including Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and The Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. Woods has received numerous awards including a Center for Photographic Art Artist Support Grant, a Film Arts Foundation Grant, and the San Francisco Art Institute’s MFA Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at Djerassi, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Her work has been published in The New York Times and Harpers, among others. Woods lives in Pacifica, CA with artist Josh Smith and their three children. She is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in SF.

Instagram: @vanessa_woods_studio

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Amalgam, 2025. ©Vanessa Woods

About the Curator

Allie Haeusslein is the Director at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, the largest space in North America dedicated to photography. She conceived and edited the book Photographers Looking at Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation, published in 2019. Her writing and interviews have been included in exhibition catalogues and monographs, and have appeared in publications such as Aperture, ART21 Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Foam Magazine. In addition to her curatorial work at Pier 24 Photography, Haeusslein has also curated exhibitions for outside venues including Filter Photo in Chicago and the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, among others.