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Vance Wood, born in New York (b.2000) is a visual artist who earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree with a minor in Art History at the University of Colorado, �鶹ӰԺ (May 2023). She emphasizes in painting and drawing, specifically exploring concepts of identity, memory, nostalgia, and the digital era through figurative works.

“I use painting to learn and unlearn, to expand and be brought back to earth, to breathe in and breathe out, and to share that experience of self-reflection with others.”

I use self-portraiture in order to reflect on and explore my personal identity. My autobiographical work abstracts subject matter from my life that relates to overall human experiences, encouraging my audience to reflect on their own lives. My work shares themes of memory, gender, sexuality, mental health, the male gaze, and beauty standards, in conjunction with the digital era. In my paintings, I often combine many references such as photos, digital information, and personal objects to memorialize life fragments that could otherwise be lost within contemporary clutter.

I use a highly saturated palette to elicit an emotional reaction to color and provoke association with digital media. Through a combination of digital processes and my reverence for historical art (such as the Renaissance and modernist movements), I frame my work that relates to these prior movements within a contemporary context. People are constantly seeing the world through pixels, artificial “digitizements”, and photographs, and the modern world is filled with content and visual stimulation right at our fingertips. I invite you, the viewer, to engage in a truly human and physical experience: looking at a painting.