Qualeasha Wood's 'Malware' Exposes the Underbelly of Being Chronically Online

For Qualeasha Wood, a glitch can be good. In her latest solo show at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, the Philly-based artist delves into the glitch as aesthetic and a language for moving through a world where selfhood is constantly mediated and warped. Balancing digital disenchantment with an optimistic eye, Wood puts a spin on body horror conventions in her latest body of work, composed of tapestries, tuftings and video.

In Malware, jacquard tapestries turn digital pixels into hand-stitched poetry. Lit by the white-blue glow of a computer screen, Wood emblazons her signature webcam self-portraits with confessions of burnout and online overexposure, taking the form of Python and Java script. Her videos give this code a second life, using it to pixelate and datamosh her body out of recognition.

Moving into the gallery, her tufted works ground us in memory, placing viewers in the soft domesticity of her grandmother’s house. In these moments, she explores the slippage between life online and “AFK” (away from keyboard), weaving together memory distortion, innocence and themes of girlhood.

“Like a computer virus, [a glitch] infiltrates and corrupts systems, but it also creates new pathways, rewriting frameworks and forging new possibilities,” the gallery wrote. Wood embraces this duality, drawing a parallel to Black femme identities which are all too often “pathologized as errors or disruptions” in the eyes of the same systems that consume them.

“Across Wood’s practice, paranoia and anxiety multiply as she continually asks what it means to exist within systems that see you as both product and problem, main character and menace.”

Malware is now on view in London through April 26.

Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
6 Heddon St,
London W1B 4BT,
United Kingdom