Jody Wood: Collecting Health
Collecting Health | Installation View | Press Release | KoKo Press Release
February 10 – March 22, 2024
Opening Reception: February 10th, 7-9pm
Remedy Giveaway and Breakfast: March 23, 11am – 1pm
cHURCH OF MONIKA: Open Source Pharma: March 17, 11am – 1pm
Family Sunday: March 3rd, 3-5pm
Social Pharmacy Social: February 22nd, 6-8pm
Open Source Gallery is please to present Collecting Health, an exhibit by Jody Wood.
Collecting Health presents a body of work that explores the roles of faith, community, and trust in medicine and asks how health care might exist outside of the allopathic marketplace. The exhibition features Social Pharmacy (2021-ongoing), a mobile installation facilitating a community exchange of home health remedies for physical, emotional, and mental wellbeing. The ongoing project redefines public health as a collaborative performance and asks what healing rituals can be found in simple acts of generosity between members of society, and by utilizing the natural world around us.
Social Pharmacy accumulates a living library of people who comprise specific locales, offering a non-hierarchical collection of health resources from traditional and family knowledge that can be accessed in public space. The project uses concepts of performance to move an individualistic behavior of self care into a relational gesture of community care, transforming personal health regiments into exchangeable objects and recipes.
Collecting Health brings together artworks related to Social Pharmacy, and launches a new Brooklyn iteration. For this version, Wood collaborated with the local Park Slope community through a workshop which explored participants’ various home remedies, all of which are included in her installation at Open Source. Visitors are invited to activate the installation by taking remedies and contributing their own written recipes in exchange. The exhibition also includes concurrent research including Remedy Altar I: How to Sleep in Cape Town, Sweden, and New Jersey; Taxonomies of Care, Against Medical Advice, a single-channel video of participant interviews, Social Pharmacy: Portraits, a series of photographic prints, and Social Pharmacy: New Jersey, a fold-out carrying case of remedies collected in collaboration with Elijah’s Promise and coLAB Arts in New Brunswick, NJ.
Jody Wood is an American artist working in mediums of social practice, video, photography, and performance. Her itinerant public projects address health, care, and poverty and have been supported by prestigious institutions including A Blade of Grass, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Esopus Foundation, an ArtPlace America Initiative at McColl Center for Art + Innovation, the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento Grant Award (FLAD) in Portugal, and through residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Yaddo, and Skowhegan School for Painting and Sculpture. Her work has been presented internationally in solo exhibitions at Skövde Art Museum and Norrtälje Konsthall in Sweden, WhiteBox Gallery front window in NYC, Blaffer Art Museum project space in Houston, and group exhibitions and screenings at Manchester School of Art, UK; Parrish Museum of Art in Water Mill, NY; and Rond-point projects in Marseille, FR. Her work has been featured in publications such as The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, and MSNBC.
