Parting and Returning

Parting and Returning focuses on the conscious experience and immediacy of the present as an active constellation of multiple times and tenses rather than a singular moment exempt from past and future. Working through a collage-like process, Augusta Wood constructs images through an overlay of separate and distinct photographic captures. At times they verge on the idiosyncratic composition of drawing, while at others they read as spectral or haunted spontaneities and observations. 

Wood reveals the subtle and extreme photographic shifts in changing times of day, qualities of light, and physical vantage points, layering images to emulate the amorphous and collectively blurred nature of our experiential impressions. In Parting and Returning, these immersive, and layered composite images are shown alongside single, direct frames to create intersecting narratives and a sense of poetic synchronism.

This self-conscious act of looking is central to the construction of Wood’s images, as is the pictorial distillation of psychic experience into a two-dimensional format. The complex subtlety of each image commands pause and slows the act of viewing to a poetic or interstitial pace. Whether in her nuanced observations of the shifting qualities of her personal space or the side by side self-portraits of mother and daughter taken some years apart, each image becomes a living imprint and gesture, reminiscent of both time’s passing and its cyclical return.