PRESS:
KQED - Sarah Hotchkiss "...Part critique of the idealized California lifestyle, part analysis of food as analogies for human body parts, and 100 percent filled with great artwork titles, you may never look at a cucumber the same way again."
EBX - Sarah Burke "Micah Wood's paintings have a Matisse-like simplicity, and the vibrant palette to match...He uses that style to tackle America's obsession with diets. By breaking down symbols from within food culture, Wood's work explores food labeling, gendered consumerism, and the notion that groceries always carry guilt..."
SF/ARTS - Christian Frock "...The work promises the sense of having stepped into another dimension, surrounded by an uncanny landscape..."
OAKLAND ART ENTHUSIAST "...Micah Wood explores the convoluted semiotics of Western world's food economy, presenting a visual survey and critical commentary on modes of food marketing, and unique perception of food itself..."
On Glossary - Leora Lutz: "Johansson Projects has unique architecture, and they have repeatedly used the space in interesting ways..."

In his first solo exhibition at Johansson Projects, Micah Wood explores the semiotics of coherent symbols through painting and sculpture by presenting a critical commentary on western society’s strange relationship to food marketing and to food itself. “Healthy Tears” uses the physicality and spatial weight of sculpture techniques as well as the expressive and organic substance within painting to create a work that questions perception and truth in relation to consumer culture. Wood attempts to unpack an apparent hypersensitivity around food labeling and product awareness, while also questioning how consumer products are gendered, and the trope of certain foods as they become analogies for the body. In a Saussurean exploration of signs, warm flashes of color and organic elements alongside textural minimalism work to deconstruct our familiar symbols to their bare minimums. In their figurative simplicity, Wood’s paintings are intimate and inviting, and in turn call on the viewer to reevaluate their emotional relationships to food and consumer culture. Wood wrestles with his realization that almost all foods in Western society carry some form of guilt behind where it comes from. Name a fruit, vegetable, or meat and someone can tell you five reasons why you are hurting yourself, the environment, or supporting a drug cartel. Wood aims to champion the messy amongst the pristine, to highlight the carnage, rage and violence that underlies our desperate attempts at portraying our lives as ‘normal’ and ‘perfect’. He references Thomas Pynchon in “Vineland”, who speaks on vegetarian pacifists and other exaggerated forms of diets. Wood finds this carnage and hypersensitivity in the everyday, in a pint of blueberries spilled on a pristine white aisle that accidentally creates a actionist, gestural painting, in a contact solution advertising the supposed simulation of “healthy tears”, in a health food store sign mistakenly read as “BIO CARNAL”. In his exhibition, Wood presents his response to the ideally perfect California lifestyle, an examination of “unhealthy tears” and of “organic sex”, challenging us to question how we are molded by accepted ways of perception within western society and consumer culture by presenting his own new visual language.