dreaming woman

jo wood-brown

Dreaming Woman, an installation by Jo Wood Brown, showcases a collection of stories told through painting, video, and installation. Centering on a figure by the same name, Dreaming Woman pervades throughout the exhibition. Taking on many forms, genders, and geographies, her presence always dreams of new futures.

Dreaming Woman encapsulates a contemporary archetype that travels through the unseen channels of the ephemeral universe. She operates as a connective tissue linking civilizations, migrations, dreams, music, poetry, dance and visual media together through her presence and image. Part of her lore comes from inherent connections between the feminine and the lifeforce…the female ability to grow life, and the connection between her rhythms and those like the moon to the tides, to nature. Dreaming Woman travels these trajectories, aspecting the qualities of each media she uses to tell the story.

The exhibition expands through the collaboration with Jean Carla Rodea, whose soundscape holds the space, and Fred Moten’s Sylph Poems featured in Sylph Altas. Dreaming Woman asks us to dream, to transform, and to see new possibilities. By providing space for collective contributions, the viewers and the performers emerge as part of Dreaming Woman’s story. Soundness for Dreaming Woman is a multi-channel sound installation composed of field recordings, archival materials, and voice, designed by Jean Carla Rodea. Fictive and non-linear narratives about a woman on an itinerant journey inspire the work, which also features Fred Moten reading his poetry, Whit Dickey’s trio with Rob Brown and Brandon Lopez, Rodea’s voice and electronics, and field recordings by Wood Brown and Rodea.

Performance Schedule:

Saturday, Jan. 21, 5:30pm: Lost Voyage Collective: Miriam Parker - rebeca medina - Jean Carla Rodea - Jo Wood-Brown

Saturday, Jan. 28, 5:30pm: Sam Newsome
6:30pm: William Parker - Ellen Christi - Patricia Nicholson

Sunday, Feb. 12, 5:30pm: Miriam Parker - Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez
6:30pm: Brandon Lopez - Rob Brown - Whit Dickey - Fred Moten

Sunday, Feb. 19, 5:30pm: Jean Carla Rodea - rebeca medina - Rob Brown

Dreaming Woman is a co-presentation in partnership with Arts for Art (AFA). Founded in 1996, Arts for Art is dedicated to the promotion and advancement of Multicultural Improvised Creative Arts -- an African American indigenous art form in which improvisation is principal. AFA works to preserve the legacy of FreeJazz, and to ensure a vital future through its re-imagination by new generations of artists.

about the artist:

Jo Wood-Brown is a painter and multimedia artist working in Lower Manhattan for the past four decades. raised in Los Angeles, received her BFA at Otis Art Institute where she was taught by Charles White. In 1976, she moved to NYC, and continued her education at Lester Polakov Studio and Forum of Stage Design. Her formative years in New York City were shaped by process art and site-specific concepts of space, mentored by friendships with Jene Highstein and Robert Janz. Working at The Kitchen among the visual artist Michael Zwack and choreographer Bill T. Jones, she was first exposed to the interweaving of disciplines. She was part of the East Village and later Soho and Chelsea gallery scenes exhibiting her paintings and installations at International with Monument, Tribes, Lisa MacDonald, and Paul Sharpe Galleries. Wood-Brown has worked closely with Arts for Art, a non-profit in Lower East Side, and their concert series “Vision Festival” where she has contributed artworks and collaborated with musicians William Parker and Rob Brown, as well as poet and scholar Fred Moten, choreographer Patricia Nicholson, artists Jean Carla Rodea, Miriam Parker, Nancy Zendora, and Sally Silvers, and many others. After 9/11, she founded Artist Exchange International, an artist-led curatorial project reflecting national trauma seen through the eyes of its artists. Exhibitions were held in Belfast, Wuppertal, NYC, and Berlin. Shortly after, Wood-Brown directed her attention to collaboration and formed InnerCity Projects with Miriam Parker. Most recently, as an outgrowth of their collaboration, Wood-Brown and Parker developed a collective project called “Lost Voyage” with artists Jean Carla Rodea, rebeca medina, Merche Blasco, Asiya Wadud, and Tiffani Moore in residency at FiveMyles in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. She has also recently shown at Pioneer Works in collaboration with Jean Carla Rodea for Vision Festival 25, and has an upcoming solo exhibition/installation at FiveMyles comprising all of her media in 2023.

The Collaborators for “Dreaming Woman”:

Jean Carla Rodea: Rodea’s background as a Mexican artist is inextricably tied to the narrative of Dreaming Woman. Particularly, to the narrative in the video in which Migrant Workers who discover Dreaming Woman in a field in California, and their return journey to the great civilizations of the Mayan people.
Wood-Brown and Rodea have been collaborators over the past several years. They are both members of the Lost Voyage Collective.

Fred Moten: Moten is an African American scholar and poet. Wood-Brown and Moten collaborate across their disciplines (poetry and sylph photos) in the “Sylph Atlas”, an art book that will be part of the installation. They have collaborated in the past as part of Arts for Art’s Vision Festival when Moten wrote poems based on Wood-Brown’s sylphs.

GALLERY HOURS:

Thursday - Sunday, 1 - 6pm, or by appointment. Please email hanne@fivemyles.org, or call 718-783-4438.

DIRECTIONS:

Take 2, 3, or 4 trains to Franklin Avenue. Walk two blocks against the traffic on Franklin. Walk ¾ block to 558 St. Johns Place. FiveMyles is within easy walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

FiveMyles is in part supported by the New York State Council for the Arts, Public Funds from the New York City Dept. of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, Council Member Laurie Cumbo, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, the Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation,
the Perlemeter Foundation, the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts,
the Joseph Robert Foundation, and the William Talbott Hillman Foundation.