| Andre Woodward finds strange beauty in unexpected places. A beaten-up piece of asphalt raised on wheels and sprouting a small, frail tree becomes a grim urban landscape, mutated for speed. Blocks of concrete ordered in symmetrical grids or dispersed in random configurations miraculously burst with life, pierced by small trees that inject the irrepressible vitality of nature into hard-edged, dead, primary structures. In surreal, assemble-it-yourself landscapes, bonsai grow out of pulsing speakers connected to glowing lamps, their life-support systems of wires and water tanks exposed to view. Small dead trees coated with bright paint rotate at the end of music boxes, dancing like branches of coral to canned music while evoking ocean mysteries as well as land-based tribulations. Woodward’s is a process-oriented art that dares to look the abject and the commonplace straight in the eye. His theme is today’s manmade environment versus the timeless rhythms of nature. |
