Chris Woods, Chilliwack, BC
Member Since January 2010
Artist Statement Chris Woods was born in New Brunswick, Canada in 1970 and has lived in Chilliwack, BC, Canada since 1979. His work deals with the effects of consumer culture on the individual. By painting his friends against a contemporary landscape of pop-culture, belligerent branding, and omnipresent advertising, he creates images filled with both irony and sincerity.
In June 2004 he premiered the first of an ambitious two part series called The Magic Hour. The Magic Hour tackled the effects of car advertising on the physical and mental terrain of the 21st century. The Magic Hour: Part Two followed in April of 2007, completing a five-year project.
His 2000 show, Dreamland, was a look at advertising through the ever-present lens of magazines and billboards. Using himself and his friends as models he questioned the mixing of stardom and selling and the blurring of the lines between self and selfish desire.
He was awarded a B.C. Arts Council grant in March of 1998 for the production of his series McTopia, which looked at McDonald’s as symbol for a broader consumer world. The Magic Hour, Dreamland and McTopia mixed elements of sculpture with painting to create a unique and intense vision of our increasingly globalized future. Previous exhibitions dealt with the lives of his friends immersed in a world of fast-food and suburban, strip-mall culture.
In January 2000 Woods was featured in the Maclean’s magazine Faces of the Future: 100 Canadians to Watch issue. He earned the 2000 Gold Award for Illustration at the National Magazine Awards in 2001 for his ‘Church of Krispy Kreme’ cover for Canada’s Saturday Night magazine. In 2002 Woods was Artist-in-Residence at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.
In 1995 Woods was commissioned to paint The Stations of the Cross for St. David’s Anglican Church in Vancouver.
Woods’ best-known painting, McDonald’s Nation (1996), has become an icon of the anti-corporate movement and has been featured numerous times in print, electronic, and guerilla media around the world.
Woods is represented by Gallery Jones in Vancouver, BC.
Click to save as artist's preferred kit 
