As Michael Wood tells it, he first picked up a camera as a toddler. At sixteen, he snagged his own single lens
reflex and began taking photography seriously. The son of a New England production engineer father and
an artist mother, Wood merged the best of both parents’ influences, building a darkroom and printing his
own pictures. From then on, he never put his camera down again.
Wood’s teenage photography appeared in local community art shows. In college, his student project – a
giant abstract architectural mural – was the largest photograph ever produced in Canada. Wood made the
piece while studying fine art at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.
Back then, Michael Wood did not pursue photography purposefully: “Oh, no! I did the things all young
people foolishly do to enjoy themselves. I made pictures for my family and friends. I had a good time traveling
all over the world. I had a long-running international career producing live and taped video productions.
A few years ago I looked at my life, and even though I was shooting a lot, I wanted to bring my picture taking
to a more professional level. I realized that I needed to show my work…like any artist does.”
In 2010, Wood had his first solo exhibition at the Spring Street Gallery in Los Angeles. Shortly after, the
photographer-artist was juried into the hundred-year-old Los Angeles Art Association, whose members have
included Salvatore Dali. Wood’s work has appeared in more than forty art and photography venues all over
California, and has also been shown in galleries in Germany and Belgium. His presentation at the
Bruce Lurie Gallery in 2015 was his third solo exhibition.
Currently, Michael Wood is focusing on three bodies of work which all seem to share the artist’s hip,
breezy attitude and easy-going Zen-like point of view. Mystical and meditative, Michael Wood’s images
tantalize the mind and sweeten the soul.
oceans & kinesolo are Wood’s contemplative captures of the
sea that he loves, dramatized by inventive compositions
and peopled with occasional surfers.
janapada features Wood’s hauntingly beautiful tapestries
of the human parade in India and Nepal.
doublestik is a wildly elegant fine art meet-up of
seascapes and sea weeds using an old school
printing process Wood has resurrected and
brought to the ocean’s edge.
TEXT: PHIL TARLEY, JUNE 2015