Greggory Wood, “Charlotte III”

In the statement accompanying his cut-up and reassembled images, which he collectively titles Offense of Legacy, Greggory Wood tells us that by “legacy” he means to invoke something that parents, for example, might bequeath to their children. Or rather, that which they mean to leave, attempt to bestow, hope to pass on, which he argues is a futile desire—“… some of our things may haunt them or bring joy. But they are not ours. They are their own.”

What he does not say, may not even be thinking, yet strongly suggests, is that this is equally true for the content of art. By “content,” of course, we don’t mean that which is literally in the work: its subject matter, for instance. We mean that which is conveyed by an unconscious process: something that cannot be precisely expressed in words or any other language than that of art. We make a categorical error, an offense to use Wood’s term, when we assume that the artist means to relate something that we are to decode, in which task we fail should our interpretation lack accuracy. In fact, it is in the nature of art that what the artist intends and the viewer understands are as independent as the mind of a parent and that of a child.

Before he left Yorkshire to live in Los Angeles, David Hockney’s photography was widely influential. Particularly so were his Cubist Polaroids, which he made by spontaneously shooting numerous angles on a subject and then variously mounting them to produce a multi-faceted portrait. While Wood’s “Charlotte II” and “III” show clear signs of having been influenced by Hockney, Wood has also evolved his version by adding no less than three framing devices: the white borders, black mottling, and the setting the whole on a textured, white impasto field. In essence, he has announced that while it began with Hockney, he’s given his approach specific identifiers and thereby made it his own.

Cubism is often spoken of as the climax to date of Modernism; as the last genuinely new addition to the artist’s tool belt, encapsulating as it does the ability to move around the subject in both space and time while still producing a unified image. That said, most artists who have employed it since the mid-20th century have tended to tread lightly, employing the method as if in acknowledgement of its many Modern-rra masters. Wood acknowledges his debt in works like “Kubismus I, Annie,” but then rather savagely seizes the levers and bends them to his own uses. In fact, he boasts of deliberately denying his viewers things they might or should expect. I don’t have any special access to this, but for example, one of the things that seems to be missing in “Eve’s Epiphany,” which is also called “Eve’s Emancipation,” is her mouth, which is the locus of at least two of her defiant acts: eating the apple and persuading Adam to do the same.

While some works seem closely related to Hockney’s, others, like “Queer Gothic I-IV, “Quiet, Quiet, Piggy,” and the four Eve images achieve another effect entirely by essentially tessellating the image, as though it were a mosaic in which individually created squares have been assembled into a possibly imaginary image, which is to say one that doesn’t exist anywhere independently of the artwork. The result is a kind of optical, or even cerebral, massage. Given how little advance has been made over the years in anything even approaching pure Cubism, this constitutes a remarkable testimony from Greggory Wood concerning his departures, which after all are nothing like experiments, but rather complete and accomplished works.

Greggory Wood, “Eve’s Epiphany”

The Offense of Legacy, The Gallery at Library Square, Salt Lake City, through Mar. 6.

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.