louder than the sum of its parts PART TWO

more details and some fun things to do in Victoria

Apr 16, 2024

Hello, hello,

Sending a little extra note this month in support of my upcoming solo exhibition. Sitting with a lot of complicated feelings around this. It’s up and down and changeable as the weather (which is a lot these days). Today I’m in AND space again or maybe I never leave. It’s hard to say “hey come look what I made” amid so much intense violence and pain that we must bear witness to AND it’s important to make space for curiosity, kindness and joyful experiences. So here we are with a foot in both places.

I made a Victoria specific playlist with some travel tips for you but I am not an expert so if you have a favourite place to go share in the comments. I’d love to see you there!

I’ll be at the fifty fity arts collective at 2516 Douglas St for the opening on Thursday, May 2 from 7-10pm and each Saturday in May from 12-4. The show is up from May 2-25. You can also visit the gallery during the week by making an appointment.

A lot of us in Vancouver think Victoria is super far and expensive which it can be but here are a few hacks I’ve figured out lately to make things more accessible. Read on for lots of free or lower cost things to do.

Walk on the ferry to save on the fare and come for the day. The Canada Line will take you to Bridgeport Station where you can get an express bus (620) straight to the Tswassen ferry terminal. On the Victoria side you’ll take the (70) bus to Bay street and the gallery is just North of Bay.
Another ferry tip is to book on the Spirit of Vancouver and pay a little extra to go into the Seawest Lounge. It’s very peaceful and there are snacks and a washroom for those of us who get overstimulated in group situations. It still works out to be less than bringing a car over. I will admit it is a long day of travel (3+ hours each way) but you’re on a ferry in the Inside Passage which is beautiful so it’s fun travel!
Visit some other galleries while you are there. These ones are open Saturday afternoons and walkable from the fifty fifty: Deluge, Legacy Downtown, Arc Hive, X Changes
There is of course the Royal BC Museum and all the usual tourist things you find when you google Inner Harbour but there is also a wonderful Chinatown just a little bit over with delicious snacks, interesting architecture and the Songhees (West Song) Walkway via Johnson Street Bridge. It is a mostly paved pedestrian path that takes about an hour each way and goes all along the harbour to Esquimalt. You can also walk one way and then take a little ferry the other way or go part way and take a ferry back.
While I don’t have any details yet, on May 25, the last day of the exhibition, the gallery will be activated with my work and Drone Day activities. I’m expecting opportunities to meet sound based artists and maybe even try out some different sound generating things. It will be a fun way to close out the show and deepen thinking about how the work relates to non-visual ways of knowing.

Have I convinced you yet? Come on over and say hello!

Working in printmaking, sound and sculpture, Amanda Wood uses strategies of abstraction, translation, and volume to tease out material structures found in both the built environment and the natural world. She breaks down images, finds patterns through repetition and close looking, and then rearranges this data into new patterns and forms.
louder than the sum of its parts takes the halftone patterns created from photographing urban landscapes and combines them with the forms, lines, and clusters made by swarms of birds in flight. Wood finds the smallest piece of information – the bitmap or the outline of a bird and places it within an exploration of common materials and traditional practices.
Her continuous translation and rearrangement of the singular highlights the physicality and universality of the pattern language that emerges from manipulating visual information in this way. In keeping with her commitment to material exploration, Wood’s current body of work investigates and expands perception through the senses of hearing, touch, and sight.
Adapting the processes of hand weaving and screen printing to a digital framework through data sonification, she is interested in the interplay between the invisible and the material.