Have you ever wondered why our blood is tomato ketchup red? It turns out that when hemoglobin travels to our lungs and binds with oxygen, a reaction happens with the iron in our blood. The result: a bright red.

Hemoglobin is an interesting piece of our puzzle. Its sole mission is to be a messenger, a pack mule, a disposer, but most fundamentally a traveler.

There is no road left untraveled inside of us.

The sick joke is that when we bleed, these hemoglobins are flooded with their bounty—oxygen—and burst. All spoiled.

Mia Woods confronted us with this color at the Metro Art Gallery in Pomona on October 10th. A color she loves. The color of flesh. The color of an apple. The color of salmon. The color of fall. The color of a world on fire.

The color of us. Well, the us that reveals itself in moments of intimacy or pain. Who has been given the privilege to see your insides? Woods abstracts this color from the body and allows us to peer in and theorize a tad. Nice color! Wow is that what our muscles look like? But wait, are those eyeballs wedged between tendons? Is that a hand?

There’s a force present within her works, tearing us apart and refashioning us. Some, I overhead, spoke of reincarnation. What is it? Why is it so?

A center piece of this exhibition is a roughly 15 by 10 feet carpet of flesh. Woods invited guests to traverse the flesh, which had bubbles of fat and tendons strung apart. My own experience stepping on the flesh left me queasy and perturbed. My feet, however, felt refreshed.

Woods’ exhibition reminded me that regardless of the price of a GPU, whatever new gizmo Open AI came out with, or whatever job has been rendered obsolete, we are all bound by meat and bone.

On a darker note, I am reminded that in the midst of World War III seeing someone blown into a billion little bits across a room is thinkable.