Arts This Week: Adrian Wood and Voroboros
“Arts this Week” airs every Wednesday at 12 & 7 p.m. on WTJU 91.1 FM.
Casey Kuhn: For Arts This Week, we spoke with local artist Adrian Wood about their upcoming exhibition, Voroboros, at the New City Arts Initiative.
Adrian Wood: This film really started as a project for me to explore this really difficult feeling that I have that was really hard for me to put into words or to share with people. I really started just writing about the sensation in my body and trying to find ways that it showed up in my day-to-day life. It felt really attached to the sensation of living under racial capitalism, where it’s really demanded of us that we have to sell our labor and sometimes our bodies and our spirits in order to be able to keep our bodies and spirits alive. It’s sort of this paradox where you have to like, destroy part of yourself in order to maintain the rest.
CK: The exhibition features a projected film Wood created that includes different scenes to showcase that feeling.
AW: As a film, it really is sort of like a performance and in a lot of ways a dance film that really shows a lot of bodies in different landscapes and interacting with different landscapes in different ways. I think there’s really sort of a sense of compression and expansion that this work offers to the audience. It’s kind of like going through a narrow tunnel that at the end opens up into like this big, other universe. And the sound really contributes to that spatial sensation in ways that can at time feel uncomfortable and claustrophobic. Sound is really visceral, and really important to our sense of our physical selves. And so that’s part of what folks can expect to experience with this word.
Arts This Week is supported by Piedmont Virginia Community College.
