Filter Photo is pleased to announce Recast, a solo exhibition by Vanessa Woods, curated by
Allie Haeusslein.

Exhibition Dates: May 2nd – June 21st, 2025
Opening Reception: May 2nd | 6 – 9 PM (with artist talk)
Location: Filter Space | 1821 W Hubbard St, Suite 207, Chicago, IL
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Friday, 12 – 5 PM | Saturday by appointment
Filter Space is free and open to the public.
filterphoto.org | #FilterPhotoFestival | #FilterSpace

Recast is an ongoing, multidisciplinary project that combines photographs, photograms,
photographic collages, artist books, and sculpture to interrogate the malleability of
motherhood. Probing the gaps and conflicts of maternal experience, Woods shows a body
turned inside out and remade through her children’s bodies.

Woods’ work is highly iterative and shows evidence of being made and remade. Like
motherhood itself, the work is continually remixed and rebuilt. Bodies are multiplied and erased
through extensive layering, fragmentation, and re-photography. Figures and forms combine,
break, grow, shrink, and reassemble to generate spaces of vertigo, ambivalence, and
reorientation. Additionally, blank plaster fragments, used throughout the exhibition, function as
lacunae—unfilled gaps or intervals—that become the unwritten spaces in which the mother’s
identity can be rewritten.

Woods’ hybrid approach to image-making in Recast illuminates the pliancy of maternal
experience, showcasing how maternal perspective can expand the discourse around identity
and gender in contemporary art.

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About the Artist
Vanessa Woods is a San Francisco Bay Area-based artist working in photography, 16mm film, collage,
and sculpture. Her work uses a range of visual strategies and a hybrid approach to image-making to
explore discourse around identity, motherhood, and gender in contemporary art. Since graduating with
an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, her work has been exhibited throughout the United States
including Stanford Art Spaces at Stanford University, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and The
Institute of Contemporary Art in San Jose. Woods has received numerous awards including a Center for
Photographic Art Artist Support Grant, a Film Arts Foundation Grant, and the San Francisco Art
Institute’s MFA Fellowship. She has also been awarded residencies at Djerassi, the Headlands Center
for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, and in Pont-Aven, France, through the Museum of Pont-Aven. Her
work has been published in The New York Times and Harpers, among others. Woods lives in Pacifica,
CA with artist Josh Smith and their three children. She is represented by Jack Fischer Gallery in SF.

About the Curator
Allie Haeusslein is the Director at Pier 24 Photography in San Francisco, the largest space in North
America dedicated to photography. She conceived and edited the book Photographers Looking at
Photographs: 75 Pictures from the Pilara Foundation, published in 2019. Her writing and interviews have
been included in exhibition catalogues and monographs, and have appeared in publications such as
Aperture, ART21 Magazine, British Journal of Photography, and Foam Magazine. In addition to her
curatorial work at Pier 24 Photography, Haeusslein has also curated exhibitions for outside venues
including Filter Photo in Chicago and the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA, among others.

This exhibition is supported, in whole or in part, by federal assistance listing number, 21.027 awarded to FilterPhoto by the US Treasury through the American Rescue Plan Coronavirus State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds. This project is partially supported by a CityArts Grant from the City of Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs & Special Events and the Illinois Arts Council Agency. Filter Photo is partly supported by grants from the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, The Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs and Events, the Fogelson Family Foundation, the Butzlaff Family Fund, and the Henry Nias Foundation.