Commonwealth & Council presents Nadar by Suné Woods featuring a new single-channel video, the escapists. Swimmers test the buoyancy of water—with breaths held in suspension for another temporality and intelligible world. Enveloped in a familiar terrain yet made otherworldly, the escapists conjures our unrestricted physicality, autonomy, and breath. These actions propose certain mobility of desire that resists power of control, finding and gaining solace through an element that embraces the body. The swimmers move in elliptical performances for the camera within the stage of a domestic pool. Their isolation and interaction create a nonlinear narrative considering how and when escape is necessary and arguably healing. 

Suné Woods is an artist living in Los Angeles. Working with multi-channel video installation, photography, and collage, Woods’ practice examines our cultural and social histories made absent and vulnerable. Using microsomal sites such as family to understand sociological phenomena, imperialist mechanisms, and formations of knowledge, she investigates how language is emoted, guarded, and translated through the absence/presence of a physical body. Woods was an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts; Vermont Studio Center; and The Center for Photography at Woodstock. She is a recipient of the Visions from the New California initiative.