Manic Pixie Magical Negro

GALLERY KENDRA JAYNE PATRICK:

NEW YORK, NY.

Qualeasha Wood’s latest investigations into digital Black womanhood lead her to the relationship between artificial intelligence and perceptions of the black femme self. AI‑engineered face and body filters encoded into Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, et al are far more intensely transformative than their predecessors. Lead by a myth of neutrality, the digital tools that alter bodies on social media surreptitiously and instantaneously impose Eurocentric beauty ideals upon us in overbearing ways.

For women of color, long harried by the pressure to meet  those standards, Wood proposes this leading to a new kind of  dysmorphia. One wherein Eurocentric beauty standards don’t simply haunt one from the magazine cover or the movie theater or even the trashy celebrity TikTok account. Instead, these standards sit directly on your visage, showing you exactly how green eyes, a dainty nose, a higher cheek as applied to the specifics of your face make ideal beauty *just* within reach. These digital interventions symbolize a complex interaction of technology, identity, and sexual expectations. She posits that the allure of these filters isn’t merely  about beautification, but about finding belonging in a  society that regards Black femme culture as a commodity. These instant image alterations can translate to feelings of  inadequacy, triggering both depersonalization (a disconnection from one’s own identity) and body dysmorphia (a distorted view of one’s own appearance). 

Works in Manic Pixie Magical Negro aim to highlight and challenge these relationships, relying on screenshots from different applications, RAW and raw images of the artist, and digital detritus both scrapped and repurposed from its original context. Tapestries and tuftings will bear these forms not only in content, but in their meticulously edited and reorganized materiality. Her newest works are focused on long‑form storytelling, nodding to renaissance epics like Rubens’ Elevation of the Cross (1610) or Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana (1562‑63),and William Bouguereau’s Les Oreades (1902).