Greggory Wood in his studio, where his grandfather’s stainless steel developing tanks are still in use.

“I don’t want my kids to do my legacy,” says Greggory Wood. “I’m hoping my kids will think well enough of me that they’ll think I’ve given them enough tools to live their life—but not live their life like I think they should live it.” It’s a statement that could serve as the artist’s statement for his body of photograph-based work, collectively titled Offense of Legacy, which has been finding its audience in two shows in close succession: at the Gallery at Library Square in February, and now at the Center for Media Arts at Salt Lake Community College’s Salt Lake City campus. It’s a body of work from an artist grappling with personal legacy, using the tools and a love for photography he inherited from his grandfather.

Wood says he grew up relatively poor in Cedar City in southern Utah, in the home of a Jack Mormon. Like many fathers and sons, they didn’t always see eye to eye. His grandfather was something else entirely—a larger-than-life figure, something close to a god in the eyes of his grandsons. He had carried a camera through the Second World War, stationed as a welder in Sardinia, Florence, Rome, and Sicily—fix what’s broken, make what’s needed he was told. He photographed everything around him: street scenes, people caught in unguarded moments, the dry comedy of daily life under extraordinary circumstances. He came home with an archive and kept shooting for decades, accumulating negatives with more enthusiasm than archival discipline.

Wood began shooting photographs off and on in the 1990s with an old Canon bought in Texas during his LDS mission, but the practice was something he circled without committing to. In college, at the University of Utah, he studied anthropology. Gave that up to support a young family. When his grandfather began giving him his developing equipment—stainless steel developing tanks, enlargers, the physical infrastructure of a practice—”that’s when things kind of started getting interesting for me, because I could go in and actually develop prints.”

The warm, amber-toned pieces show cyanotypes toned in coffee or tea, their mulberry paper surfaces carrying the texture of the process itself.

Shortly before his death, his grandfather also passed on his collection of negatives. “You make a print, the print gets destroyed — fine,” he told Wood. “You can always go back to the darkroom. But save the negatives.” It was good he passed them on when he did. The day of the funeral, renters were careless with their cigarettes and his grandfather’s house burned to the ground.

The negatives sat in a box for a decade. Then the pandemic arrived. “I was just so bored and anxious and nervous and not being able to go anywhere. And I started pulling them out.” He began scanning the negatives seriously, printing some of his grandfather’s images, and turning back to his own work with new intensity. He’d always shot nudes and landscapes, but there was something more he wanted to say, and the form he had wasn’t saying it.

That changed in 2024, when Wood visited London with his wife and found himself at a David Hockney retrospective. He sat through the program twice. What arrested him was Hockney’s photographic work: the Cubist collages assembled from dozens of individual shots, multi-perspective portraits that the mind tries and fails to resolve into a single coherent image—perfectly disconjoined, as Wood puts it. “Your mind’s trying to put it together,” he says. “You really can’t. Maybe you linger there a little bit longer, maybe you look at things that you wouldn’t have seen in an original photograph.” He came home and started working differently—first with square images, then collaging and overlaying photographs. “It just felt organic, natural,” he says. “There was this kind of buzz going on inside of me when you’re working on something. It just kind of takes over you.”

It was a form that allowed him to come to terms with his upbringing. His father had died in 2019, and the ghost of that legacy haunted those pandemic years. Growing up in the LDS church in southern Utah carried its own transmissions: expectations about identity, about what a life should look like, about the obligations owed to community and tradition. His relationship with his father was freighted with disagreement on much of this. Reaching further back in the family history for something worth carrying forward, he found that even his grandfather—that charming, god-like figure—had feet of clay, had been a man of his time. He could be domineering and short-sighted. There was the aunt who couldn’t marry the man she loved because he’d been divorced. “I don’t have anything that I can really grasp onto as a legacy,” Wood says.

The title Offense of Legacy names the push: legacy, as he uses the term, is what parents attempt to bestow on children—the values, the habits, the identities they hope will persist. His argument is that this desire is not just futile but a kind of trespass. Children are not vessels for the past. They are their own.

The results appeared at the Gallery at Library Square, where 15 Bytes’ Geoff Wichert observed that while works like “Charlotte II” and “III” show clear signs of Hockney’s influence, Wood had evolved his own version by adding framing devices—white borders, black mottling, textured impasto fields—that announced he had made the approach his own. Wichert noted that Wood “rather savagely seizes the levers and bends them to his own uses,” deliberately denying viewers things they might expect. Other works in the show, like the “Queer Gothic” series and the four Eve images, achieved a different effect entirely, tessellating the image as though it were a mosaic in which individually constructed squares assemble into something that may not exist anywhere independently of the artwork. Wood’s fragmented form is an argument about perception, about the impossibility of the fixed, authoritative image, the single perspective that claims to tell you what something is.

Examples of Wood’s digitally manipulated and cut-and-reassembled works at SLCC’s Center for Arts & Media, with newest works from 2026 below.

He is not interested in keeping his views out of the work. “I have something that I want to say about a community that is mistreated and misaligned, especially in today’s social climate,” he says. Wood remembers walking down a junior high hallway in Cedar City in the 1980s when a kid started taunting a classmate he knew to be gay. He turned around and punched him. Decades later, his position hasn’t softened, and his grounds have only deepened. His son is gay. “As I came to terms with what the church was teaching me about the LGBT community, and what I was seeing,” he says, “it was just not even remotely the same.” The gas mask imagery that recurs in works like “Lilith” entered his vocabulary early, borrowed from a Sheffield protest photograph, and has stayed because it continues to say what he needs it to say. Lilith stands on the Bible. She is not interested in the garden’s terms. “There’s a push against organized religion,” Wood says. “There’s kind of a push against the patriarchy as well.”

The newest work, from 2026, pushes those arguments into the physical. Working in front of the computer, Wood had grown dissatisfied with what even the most sophisticated digital manipulation could achieve. “I wanted to do things with texture on its own,” he says. “The physical act of creating texture. You can add texture digitally but it’s still a flat image.” He looks for the right way to say it: “Working on the screen just wasn’t hitting my G-spot.”

Evidence of Wood’s new process using mulberry paper.

If the earlier work broke apart the image, the new work gives those fragments a body. The subjects remain the ones he has always circled: inherited ideas about gender and religion, identity and conformity, the cost of carrying forward what was never yours to carry. He has been working with cyanotypes printed on translucent mulberry paper—processed using what he calls the Walsh technique, rolled into a window screen, developed in hydrogen peroxide, hung to dry—which produce images with the texture of the fibrous material built into them, transparent enough to be worked from behind as well as in front. Grounds of plaster and charcoal give the assembled pieces a relief quality, a literal depth, that transforms the photograph into something closer to a sculptural object.

He describes wanting to push further still—returning to Hockney’s collage approach but using cyanotype panels, each individually worked and textured before being assembled into a larger fractured whole. In his space at Poor Yorick Studios in South Salt Lake, finished works behind mats and mockups of works in progress surround a busy workspace, where a homemade UV exposure unit shares space with a paper trimmer, jars of brushes, drafting pens and a copy of the King James Bible. And beneath a worktable, his grandfather’s stainless steel tanks are still in use. What Wood has chosen to do with them is entirely his own.

The surface of a finished piece: translucent mulberry paper over a plaster border, mounted on a heavily textured black ground. What began as a photograph has become an object.

Greggory Wood: Offense of Legacy, Center for Arts & Media: Salt Lake Community College, Salt Lake City, through May 22.

All images courtesy of the author.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.