Geary is pleased to present Sparkling or Still, Kristine Woods’ solo exhibition of weavings, prints and sculptures. Woods is showing works on paper for the first time and Vagrancies Rules, a 13’ long free-standing textile, is reconfigured in response to the architectural elements of the gallery. The small weavings in the series, of or related to, are made on a rudimentary portable loom.

Felt Around Federal Standard 33538 is a large scale felted wool installation that makes specific use of Geary’s windowed view of a highly regulated public space to consider color, the history and properties of felt, and the standardization of the movement of bodies.

Felt for a distance not measured. Lengths and widths implied loops or hanging planes extend indefinitely as neither part, nor whole; fibers bound or woven are their very gravity; papier-mache formed by materials own properties; supported by rock foundations or wood sticks, remnants of a garden, beach or street, the origin never fully known. Every thing is what it appears to be and it is not that at all. Such are the conundrums that imbue Kristine Woods’ labors. Each is its own that commands the artist’s earnest devotion to something that neither begins nor ends with the artist, yet requires her attention.

This show, these objects, the space, before entering, walking through the gallery, upon leaving— the narrative has already been described and employed. The narrative itself is a ready-made. The ready-made does not exist. Nothing is ready-made. Go beyond that. Listen. Breathe. Feel. Move. Look.

We are neither knowing nor not knowing. Neither mind nor matter. Just look.

There is nothing wrong with the idea that this object calls to mind that thought, nor even in the idea that ‘this object is the idea of that.’ But limiting commentary to one object as one idea is a mistake. What’s before you, every form is within consciousness all at once. The object cannot tell you what it is because it is beyond words and yet its description is only words, both beyond description, neither itself nor description. It is something else altogether.

The object is beyond consciousness and therefore in consciousness. We cannot say what it is. Only what it is not. To say that it is ‘art’ is a mere convention. To feel it is beyond convention.

Still the question, “What is it?” must be of some use? Is it?

It has no answer in consciousness and therefore it helps to get beyond consciousness.

Yet here it is, the art object in the gallery. It is here, in the present moment. What is real in it?

The question is unnecessary. If you are thinking here I am now, and this object is there before me, stop there. The object is. Don’t turn a fact into a question.

So many facts have been turned into questions when what is persists indifferent to our questions.

Consider that this, what is—it gives without asking anything of its viewer. It is generative and generous.

These objects aren’t necessarily a burden, and a burden is not inherently critical. These objects can be each, and all, neither or both.

No search. Just consider.

Consider this. It is a proposition, entirely basic, entirely new, both and neither.

Is it? That’s the question.

Kristine Woods (1964 Chicago) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Recent shows include Such Is, a solo exhibition curated by Janice Guy at MBnb, NYC, New York (2019), Regarding & Regardless, a solo exhibition at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia (2018), and The Portrait is Political, a group exhibition curated by Liz Collins at BRIC, Brooklyn, New York (2019). Woods spent the fall of 2018 in residency at Textilsetur Islands (Blonduos, Iceland), and is a recipient of a Creative Capital Artists Grant. Kristine Woods earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is full time faculty at The Maryland Institute College of Art. Her work will be included in a two-person presentation by Geary in NADA’s inaugural Chicago Invitational. This is Woods’ first solo exhibition at the gallery.