Preview
By Mia Johnson
April/May 2007

Chris Woods continues to query our automotive aspirations in his second series of work about car culture, The Magic Hour, Part Two. In 2004, he examined the dark side of car advertising in The Magic Hour, Part One. The images in Part Two revel in the sense of mastery afforded by cars.

Several paintings depict figures holding swords aloft, extolling the powers granted to them by their cars and feeling indestructible. “Six-Point Adjustable” features a woman crouched in front of her car wearing nothing but a bulletproof vest. In “Professional Driver, Closed Course”, a woman stands behind her open car door deflecting bullets. Using a combination of photographs shot in his studio, ads culled from magazines and stock photos from the Internet, Woods continues to question not only the influence of the car over us, but our choice in using cars – especially SUVs and other “road weapons” – against ourselves. He asks, “Does the car seek to bless us or destroy us?”

Woods is known for posing his Gen-X friends in parodies of consumerism. His McTopia series probed the ubiquity of fast food franchises, including our devotion to corporations like McDonald’s and Burger King. His images have appeared on the cover of Adbusters magazine, in Saturday Night magazine, in the films Clerks 2 and The Corporation, and numerous other publications. In 2004, as he and his friends entered their thirties, Woods moved from earlier themes of teenage angst and the “religion” of fast food to the automobile industry. He has had numerous solo shows in Canada and the United States.