David Woodward
David Woodward is a visual artist based in Tkaronto/Toronto, ON, who works predominantly in paper collage using found media. Since graduating from the Fine Art and Art History programs at Queen’s University (2013) their work has been exhibited in Canada and abroad in group and solo exhibitions. David has received project grants from the Toronto Arts Council (2017, 2020), the Canada Council for the Arts (2019) and most recently the Ontario Arts Council (2022) to support their practice. Recent exhibitions include ‘Strange Paradigm' (YNGSPC, 2021), ‘As Glass Returns to Sand’ (Likely General, 2020) and ‘Ripened Off the Vine’, a solo exhibition at Artscape Daniels Spectrum (Toronto, 2022).
With a focus on the reorganization of found-imagery and photographs, my practice utilizes the medium of collage to find paths and relationships between seemingly disparate visuals and sources. In my work, I explore relationships between the micro and macro by repurposing familiar visuals from the natural world into recognizable but unrelated shapes and forms that might function as containers or placeholders for individual experience and memory. Weaving personal and collective elements of queer identity into a broader visual narrative that reflects on the intersections between individual and communal experience, my work explores notions of interconnectedness, metamorphosis and duality. Using imagery gleaned from old books and magazines about the environment, astronomy and design, my collage works reflect a composite visual world of figures, spaces and iconography built from anachronistic fragments of the past. Divorced from their original context, cut-outs move beyond their initial representations and coalesce into new structures and forms - some colour fields, some composite-images, and some fragments standing alone like emblems or monuments, speaking to the erosion of time and the lost relevance of their former incarnations.
