Philadelphia-based Qualeasha Wood is an interdisciplinary artist whose work contemplates realities around black female ontology. Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, queer craft, Microsoft Paint, and internet avatars, her work meshes tradition with contemporary technology.

Airports, as spaces of constant flux and transition, serve as the ideal site to examine how technology mediates our experiences of space, time, and identity. People and information pass rapidly, their presence leaving only traces. For her exhibition at Philadelphia International Airport, Wood integrates jacquard-woven, glass bead tapestries with multiple video screens to explore the intersection of physical permanence and digital ephemerality. The tapestries, representing the age-old medium of weaving, stand in contrast to the screens whose continually shifting, glitching, and error-filled visuals highlight the fragility and impermanence of technology. And yet, the two elements are not as dissimilar as they might seem at first glance. Prior to the invention of the jacquard loom, weaving patterns into textiles was a slow, dangerous, and expensive process reserved only for the very rich. Jacquard machines utilized punched cards to tell the loom to raise threads in a particular sequence. The punch card is considered a key precursor to early computing systems and automating the process meant these fabrics were no longer reserved for society’s elite.

Wood’s tapestries feature a collage of selfies, error messages, and screenshots representing Black Femme figures that saturate the internet while simultaneously holding that embodiment at the margins. The glitches on the screens represent not only technological failure, but also the fragmented nature of our identities as mediated through screens. The Black Femme existence, constantly under erasure or distortion, becomes itself a kind of "glitch"—a disruption within societal structures that were never designed to accommodate or honor its fullness.

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