'Agnès' Photograph

Who are your friends? How essential are friends to you? Do you visualise them in your mind’s eye? What image gets printed on your retina? Why do some friends move in and out of our lives, seemingly without reason? Why are some friendships so dear to us, while others are fleeting, fragile, lightweight, distant or merely convenient? Indeed, all these questions seemed worth asking before the age of Facebook. In this body of work entitled ‘AURA’, Neil Wood reacting to what he calls the digital flattening of his friends and presents a singular set of portraits screen extracted from his own list of Facebook friends. He relates: ‘When Facebook came along I suspect many of us signed up with more than a little suspicion and then got taken in by the program - the photos, the wall, the threads… it’s been fun but perhaps many of us have learnt to keep it at bay. Nevertheless there’s been a change. My own understanding and perception of what friendship means has changed because of the network. In fact my Facebook list of friends crystallises the question by creating a new order - an order where meaning, value and the history that we thought we knew - no longer count for much. ‘This would be fascinating from an anthropological point of view except the experiment is feeding live across the internet and is simultaneously applied to the flesh and bone of our lives - and even more powerfully to our psyches’ In seeking to break the rigid design of the application Neil Wood placed his mobile phone flat onto his computer screen, exactly above each thumbnail in his Facebook friends list and made a series of screen-grabs. The result of this appropriation is ‘AURA’, a set of nine portraits blown up by 10 thousand percent, smoothed but otherwise unretouched, and printed on pearl finish ink jet paper.

Photography:Ink on Paper

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:29.5 W x 39.4 H x 0.2 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.