2023/4
10 ft h x 9 ft d x 17 ft w
Installation, painting, sculpture
The term “Comfort Room” in the Philippines means “bathroom”: in this series, the term is ironically repurposed to invoke a space for grief, loss, solace and transition, with the paintings and installation set in a fantastical, hotel-like space. Lightweight fake rocks function as semi-comedic surrogates for the ponderous symbolism of real rocks and their evocations of permanence, heaviness and place.
2024
acrylic on wall
Commissioned for SFMOMA’s ‘Bay Area Walls’ series by curator Tanya Zimbardo.
Diving into history at the London 1948 Summer Olympic Games, Victoria “Vicki” Manalo Draves (1924–2010) became the first Asian American gold medalist. Jenifer K Wofford pictures Draves suspended in a pike in a vast space of gradient color, flanked by two other moments in the dive sequence. Wofford describes imagining a “soft inward focus with the mannered tension in Draves’s position—both completely on display and totally inside herself.”
The SFMOMA commission and Wofford’s larger Draves project engage the athlete in a manner more abstract than narrative, exploring the “tensions of surface and submersion in the dreamlike world of her diving practice.”
Mise-en-scene in two parts (front stage, back stage) addressing grief, loss, and liminality. The term “Comfort Room” in the Philippines means “bathroom”: here, it’s instead meant to invoke spaces of solace and transition.
Exhibition for the Stanford Art Practice Program’s Holt Visiting Artist Residency, curated by Gabriel Harrison.
2023
painting: acrylic on wood panels and shapes
as exhibited at Museum of Craft and Design
Legendary Bay Area rapper E-40 has a song called Choices (Yup); in it, he posits that everyone has choices to make, and asks a series of questions that are answered “Yup” or “Nope”. Much of the song is the usual braggadocio, but it is fantastic, hypnotic, and deeply Bay Area, so much so that he rewrote it as a Golden State Warriors anthem , too.
For an exhibition on crafting a Bay Area life, I navigate my own choices to stay or leave as a Bay Area native. This diptych is based on a stylized basketball court layout as I’ve considered whether I’m to remain the home team or the away team. I choose home, but being away is also necessary to play the game.
Ever since the terrible “Orange Day” of wildfire smoke in 2020, I have employed the complementary colors of blue and orange in certain projects. When you mix two complements, you get a range of more neutral shades: these shades are the SF fog and mist which move across this composition as well. It’s not easy to make clean “yup/nope” choices here in the Bay Area: decisions can be shrouded in fog, and held in a state of in-between-ness.
‘Fight and Flight’ exhibition curated by Jackie Francis and Ariel Zaccheo.
2022
paintings: acrylic on canvas
as exhibited at Silverlens
6 paintings included in ‘Aquifer’, an exhibition with MM Yu and Dina Gadia at Silverlens Gallery, Philippines. These paintings evolve Wofford’s ‘Rupturre’ project which speaks to history and crisis. However, this recent work is less about abrupt rupture while still being about change and other unstable, mutable energies shifting beneath the surface.
Images or terms that have informed this work, and the shapes and patterns within them: Energy. Mysteries. Spells. Portals. Power. Protection. Containment. Liminality. Neuroplasticity. Electricity. Psychedelia. Vision. Rage. Grief. Loss. Calamity. Battlefields. Flow vs break. Fluidity vs rigidity.
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