Statement lauren woods’ hybrid media projects use video and 16-mm film as well as appropriated material to contemplate and question cultural and collective memory in history as wells as contemporary times. Her work, inspired by sociopolitical theories, psychology, and contemporary and historical film and art discourses, takes shape in the form of single-channel projections and large-scale multichannel video installations. woods creates “ethno-fictive” (a term borrowed from Jean Rouch) documents of her navigation through the world as an American woman artist of the African Diaspora, approaching the documentary as subjective, rather than objective. Committed to her creative desires as an artist and to confronting her subjectivity, she is intrigued with cinema’s ability to manipulate emotion and attempts to create visceral work that translates her personal perspective to communicate across ethnic, cultural, and national divisions. woods’ devotion to cinema as a public art form and method of communication has led her to considering the place of art in the public realm. Currently, she is exploring how traditional monument-making and public site-specific work can be translated into new contemporary models of memorializing—substituting the traditional marble and granite for the newer medium of video.
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