In love with the wilderness, and with the complex and lonely terrain of the human heart, Cedra Wood makes paintings and drawings that marry the elements of both worlds in unlikely ways, creating narrative metaphors for humanity’s relationships with the environment.
For this series of mirage-based work, she traveled around the Great Basin, creating costumes and props out of site-specific materials (desiccated tilapia bones from the Salton Sea, Jeffrey’s pine cone scales from the eastern Sierra Nevada, human-derived lint from Lehman Caves). Her paintings of the resulting characters and scenes represent an attempt to communicate a persistent and haunted double-vision of the vast, complex spaces of the American West.
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Wood grew up in the Texas panhandle and received her MFA at the University of New Mexico.