I Know This Place by Heart, by Ahnika Wood and Karina Rovira
I Know This Place by Heart is a visual collection built over eight years of long-distance creative partnership from duo Ahnika Wood and Karina Rovira. Together, they bring distinct artistic traditions into dialogue wherein textiles, the body, the camera, and light become shared language.
Early in their collaboration, the pair set out to photograph each other as a way to understand their connection. Resulting images were experimentally printed, altered manually, torn, reformatted, melted, and melded in an effort to allow room for both of their subjectivity. This project, Refraction, produced sharp qualities intended to distort light.
Years later, Wood and Rovira again place themselves both in front of and behind a medium format film camera, this time further involving each other in decision making. They reference Diana Block and Marlo Broekmans’ seminal work, Invisible Forces, which the two connected with in different ways and used as a conversation piece between them. Similarly to Block and Broekman, Wood and Rovira began positioning themselves as infinitely reflecting mirrors; upending power dynamics often found in photography and instead using the medium as a way to be seen and to see each other simultaneously.
As a result, their authorship is merged entirely—hence the use of “m/e” and “m/y” in the final titles. The titles further reference writer and philosopher Monique Wittig’s Le Corps Lesbien, a text shared by the artists while guiding silk and cyanotype to interpret the shadowy images they created. Analogue processes slow down making to allow for conversation and adjustment while the chosen materiality brings the viewer into the haziness of their internal worlds— as shifting, hard-to-place figments under the light of the moon or under water.
I Know This Place by Heart follows the evolution of their relationships throughout time, especially, but not exclusively, the complexity of the artists’ relationship with each other. They maintain a dyadic process that leaves space for difference, distance, and misunderstanding. As such, I Know This Place by Heart presents the mirroring nature of intimacy and posits that the production of selfhood is an ongoing collaboration with others.
Exhibition at Stelo Arts, 2025
Photo documentation by Malique Pye
Press Release by Luiza Lukova
Special acknowledgement to Bingyi Spurlock for providing photography assistance in the making of this work.
Review (linked here) by Kaya Noteboom for Variable West
Regenerate (Splitting Harmonies)A textile investigation, handmade & repurposed from single use plastic packaging. Made in Portland, Oregon, 2020
Textile & Art Direction by Ahnika Wood
Photography by Taniya Roberts
Modeled by Janae Nilo
Making this textile required cutting and carefully stretching thin, disposable packaging plastic, collected over several months from an office. After stretching each strand, they were then tied together to produce a continuous thread. The entirety of the thread was then crocheted. The resulting textile lost most resemblance from the ubitquious plastic objects it came from.
The land, body, and light sift porously through the textile structure. Yet, the water-repelling and almost immortal qualities of plastic manage to cloak a loved one with an airy grace. Made in response to a tumultuous relationship with textile labor under global capitalism, Regeneration reflects precarious tensions through personally constructed materiality.
Process Documentation:
A self-published artist's book and narrative in poetry, We Fold Open the House hinges on queer ritual and archive. It documents the emotive and dreamlike experience of patching together and releasing found kinship amidst collective turmoil.Captured through printed text and gestures of handwriting, as well as misregistration and spaciousness, We Fold Open the House presents itself in embodied and adapted forms simultaneously - as the queer body does.
WE FOLD OPEN THE HOUSE: A narrative in poetry
Printed by the author at the
Independent Publishing Resource Center
318 SE Main St.
Portland, Oregon USA
February 2024
Inside pages are an assortment of papers including drafting, tracing, glassine, and tissue papers. The writing is laser printed and screen printed, with handwriting taking from journal entries. The back and front covers are made from repurposed materials and the binding is handstiched in waxed linen thread.
Copyright © Ahnika Wood, 2024. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written consent from the author, except in the case of quotations embodied in other writing.
Variable edition of 20
An installation of nine tensioned panels, visable from both front and back. Photographs shot on large format film, flatbed printed on vinyl, and deteriated through ripping, sanding, and melting. Some images have additional analgoue maniplulation (burning, painting, and scratching) introduced to images after film development and before scanning for flatbed printing.
by Ahnika Wood and Karina Rovira
"I am too far to see you," -
- “you are too close to see me.''
Air can thicken between people and memory is translucent. So you walk through moments, with a vague tilting sensation. Vast motion is frozen on film and images melt into mirrors around you.
From all angles, there is an interest in proximity and tension between people. Does space connect us or cloud the vision of the other? We dramatically flip scale and distance. The space between the camera and subject is close - we attempt to see each other in brief abstraction. Resulting images become raw material for molding back to life the unseen aura. What feels false later is disintegrated through sanding, ripping and pulling. Fragility and strength are tools for forming nuance; tactile landscapes are coaxed from the surface. Refracted by constructs of dialogue and intimacy, we see and re-see the invisible string that connects us.
Up close, openings and overlaps dance. In the end the viewer is surrounded by floating suggestions, of flux and unease in implicit choreography.
- Ahnika Wood & Karina Rovira
