Drawn from an archive of personal photographs, self-portraits, advertising imagery and anatomical studies, the figures that Hood paints seem to be in a trancelike state — dreaming, sleepwalking, or hypnotized — suggesting that the disparate images that make up the compositions may be organized by dream logic or governed by a series of undetermined associations. With “portal” vignettes of sunsets, caves, and mountains, the paintings create a telescopic sensation of simultaneous depth and flatness. These sly structural allusions to the devices of artificial perspective act in constant tension by disorienting interpenetrations of layered images and the flatness of the stained surface. Their chief interest is in the complication and the relinquishment of boundaries: between the individual and the archetypal; media and medium; the subjective and the collective; the front and the back of the canvas. What may appear as collage is revealed to be a collision, with the picture plane serving as an interface between the image and the imagined.
PARA is on view through November 9 at Praz Delavallade 6150 Wilshire Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90048. photographs by Marten Elder, courtesy of the gallery
