Chelsey Tyler Wood’s new series of paintings and drawings place female bodies into cramped wooden crates. Her photorealistic execution not only demonstrates her commitment to craftsmanship and detail, her renderings call into question the assumed ‘realness’ of female portrait photography in the age of Photoshop. The cramped quarters that these figures occupy may represent the gallery, or a place where the female bodies are displayed, becoming art objects. 

Tyler Wood says of her series, “Spatially constricted they react both physically and psychologically. Their experiential condition is communicated through the bodies’ expression of color, tension and mark. The bodies are containers themselves, existing within containers, existing within containers, existing within containers and onwards.”