Chris Wood's large-scale, recent series of oil paintings engage two seemingly disparate iconographic themes: spirituality and mass culture. The paintings present a formal, as well as an iconographic analysis; the individual consumer pays spiritual homage to icons of mass culture, and the liturgical tradition in art is represented as contemporary experience. These figurative tableaux are painted with bright colours that refer to advertising and photo-realism. Violence and spiritual malaise are the disquieting forces behind these tableaux. Woods portrayal of the products of mass culture claim an ascendancy over the mundane. They inspire forms of adoration, in which commodities are treated as both erotic and divine, and the term "product wars" is given new meaning.

The paintings link the sacred with the profane, and also reverse this dialectic as products of modern consumer culture are ritualized within a religious pageant, for example: divine worship, the stigmata of Christ and the Ascension into Heaven. These encounters take place in everyday environments. As Woods outlines: "the four basics of modern consumerism are convenience stores, fast-food joints, supermarkets and vending machines." The subjects placed in these environments are modeled on friends of the artists. He constructs narratives around a ritualistic figure (usually male) seeking a higher sphere of being within mass culture.

Woods continuation of Pop Art's exploration into the productions of mass culture, work by Warhol, Liechtenstein, and others, provides a social criticism through a sense of play, that refers to an always unresolved, ambiguity of meaning. The focus on the everyday environment is therefore an implied critique of this same environment. The "realism" of the work - its closeness to the products of mass culture - revitalize Pop Art's inquiry into relationships between art and life, and illusion and reality. The work also refers to how objects, including both the work of art and products of mass culture, function to create ritual patterns of consumption, which can be viewed as a contemporary substitute for religion.

In 1994, Woods was commissioned to paint fourteen oil paintings as Stations of the Cross for St. David's Anglican Church at 2475 Franklin Street in Vancouver. The Virgin Mary, twelve apostles and Christ's persecutors all dress in contemporary clothes. Mary dresses causally in jeans, and the soldiers in their dark conservative suits represent corporate capitalism. The settings for these tableaux are the familiar streets and plazas of Vancouver: West Georgia Street, Canada Place and the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery. The paintings, sized to the traditional scale of the Stations of the Cross (12 by 16 inches), are pictorially keeping within historical record, but now Christ is condemned to death in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery (which formerly housed law courts) by a man suggestive of an art critic.

Although still a young artist (born in 1970), Woods has been producing these poignant works for over a decade. He has exhibited his work throughout Vancouver, and in 1993 was included in the traveling exhibition, London Life Young Contemporaries, that originated at the London Regional Gallery in Ontario. His work is in collections throughout North America.

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