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Biography
Christopher T Wood is an Artist, Designer, Educator, and ‘Pataphysician living in Milwaukee after spending time in Philadelphia, Chicago, and Pittsburgh. The products of his studio are often ongoing series of works on paper, driven by a need to promote societal long-term thinking. Implementing collaborations with chance events and forces of nature, his work provides imaginary solutions to impossible problems.
He earned an MFA in Painting from Northern Illinois University and a BFA in Visual Communication Design with a focus on Illustration from Dayton University. He teaches at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Peck School of the Arts and the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, and serves on the Board of AIGA Wisconsin as the Chair of Design For Good.
Wood has taken his practice to artist residencies in Iceland, Ireland, and Maryland, and has exhibited his work internationally at institutions including The Woodmere Art Museum, The Barnes Foundation, James Oliver Gallery, Portrait Society Gallery, The Drawing Hub-Berlin, and the Association of Icelandic Visual Artists, and he regularly presents visiting artist lectures on his research.
Christopher T Wood in his studio. March 2020.
Artist Statement
I harness elemental materials and fundamental processes in series-based projects. A current major undertaking, Daydrawing, is a long-term project initiated on January 1, 2016. I create daily drawings, the accumulation of which expand into a broader endeavor in the form of an entity we can experience directly but is so distributed in space and in time that it does not exist anywhere in particular.
As we enter the Anthropocene epoch, this project is of enormous importance in that it promotes a more sustainable approach to understanding an existence that is increasingly dependent upon a shift in human perspective. My ambition for this work is to assist such a shift in human awareness by connecting people around the planet and promoting long-term thinking.
The perpetual Daydrawing process proceeds each day with the creation of a new work on paper – and a hyperobject emerges as each drawing is released into the world, resulting in a diaristic, many-paneled entity that stretches through time, space, and beyond our capacity to observe.
Daydrawing, in 9 x 12 inch fragments, is both already complete and will never be completed. It is both local and becoming increasingly dispersed as the fragments drift away from one another through digital publication, collection, and exhibition. It is of critical importance to understand Daydrawing as a single object, continuously in creation and existing in many locations at once. The work’s audience currently enjoys it through digital representations on Instagram, as monthly installations in the studio, and in curated groups in galleries and collections across the planet.
Each daily addition is rendered in powdered graphite and is a keyhole view into an supplementary universe, a hallucinatory daydream that responds in part to observations throughout the day, and in part to narratives already at play within the Daydrawing universe.