CHARLOTTE, North Carolina — Qualeasha Wood is not afraid to speak her mind, online or IRL. As an artist, she understands being online as a performance, and as a Black, queer woman, she is particularly sensitive to the tension between freedom of expression and threats of violence and surveillance in digital space.
The jacquard-woven, tufted, and resin diamond-studded artworks in Qualeasha Wood: code_anima, on view at the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts and Culture until September 22, mark the artist’s most intimate performance of self to date. Curated by Leandra-Juliet Kelley as part of the Gantt Center’s 50th-anniversary program, the show unravels the digital and linguistic codes Wood navigates online as she pursues her “true inner self,” her anima.
With a Zillennial sense of humor, Wood marks that “true self” with the green star of an Instagram Close Friends story, embroidered in the upper right corner of the woven works, symbolizing the trust Wood built with Kelley and the staff of the Gantt Center, a “really special” relationship that, she explained, allowed her to “make something authentic.”
Wood considers her Close Friends story the only place where she can be her honest self without judgment online. “I don’t have to worry about, like, what it looks like if I’m posting a meme today,” she shared. But Wood’s sense of ease does not undermine her incisive point of view. Take the eye-catching “I Still Need That (40 acres)” (all works 2024), a nearly 16-foot-long weaving that depicts a fictional set of terms and conditions for accessing Blackness online. The work is tacked to a wall painted to resemble the iconic Windows 95 computer wallpaper in the center of the gallery. Nearly every visitor to the exhibition’s opening walked up to this artwork first, as if following a compulsive urge to read the work before viewing the rest of the exhibition.
But the work is purposefully illegible — these T’s and C’s fold over themselves into a pile on the floor. Error messages and text bubbles make it impossible to accept or deny the terms, to bypass this bureaucratic block of text and reach the free Internet beyond. The work represents Black disenfranchisement within American culture, the seriousness of which Wood gently undercuts with humorous selfies and an ironic text bubble at the margin of the weaving that reads, “that was really racist 💔.”
“I Still Need That (40 acres)” stands in dialogue with “Linguistics,” a work composed largely of memes Wood saved from Twitter. The weaving reads like a visualization of Legacy Russell’s argument in her latest book, Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us (2024): Wood juxtaposes memes of Black people (which, as Russell writes, often reduce them to cartoons or caricatures in a kind of digital Blackface), with a larger-than-life image of herself.
Both “I Still Need That (40 acres)” and “Linguistics” have a 3D, sculptural presence that contrasts with Wood’s flat-hanging tapestries. This material shift points towards further innovations in Wood’s practice. code_anima features a number of handmade tuftings exploring the artist’s queer childhood, and the artist’s first resin diamond-studded work, “it’s /still/ pulling me apart.” Beyond that, she is interested in installations, in Artificial Intelligence, and in writing a screenplay. It’s only a matter of time to see what corner of the Internet she’ll take on next.
