[from the pressrelease] Drawings 2003–2023 assembles one hundred artworks, exhibited chronologically, in the largest survey of Jonas Wood’s works on paper to date. The exhibition begins with drawings made by the artist following his move to Los Angeles. While he established his studio practice in the city, Wood worked as an assistant to painter Laura Owens, and had his first solo exhibition with the storied Black Dragon Society gallery in 2006. During this time, Wood began to crystallize the distinctive visual language that would come to define his mature practice. An avid draftsman, drawings have myriad purposes for Wood, serving as either preparatory sketches for collages and paintings or stand-alone works of art. At the heart of Wood’s prolific output is a reverence for the handmade: holding a found photograph in his hands, operating a manual projector, leaving behind a half-erased pencil sketch. In Plant 4 (2003), one in a series of drawings of potted plants that make up the earliest works in the exhibition, Wood’s delight in the tactility of mark-making is palpable: he used distinct strokes of crayon and spirited, imperfect shading to give shape to fields of blocky color, leaving behind an explicit citation of the hand of the artist: a single fingerprint. Works like Hunting With Mochi(2005), which depicts a cabin in the woods surrounded by a landscape made up of quilt-like patchworks of translucent color, exemplifies the influence of photo-collage on Wood’s practice. His drawings often begin with photographs, which he then cuts apart and re-composes into deliberately disjointed collages. Projecting the new, flattened-out, stylized image onto paper, Wood sketches its form using an array of media, including gouache, ink, charcoal, and ballpoint pen, producing a wide-angle lens effect that mimics the skewed proportions of memory.