Artist Nari Ward is inspired by the tradition of staging yard shows in South America, where individuals will customise the exteriors of their homes using found objects. A tradition that also inspired Rauschenberg, people take anything from old furniture to crushed cans and create art along the boundary of their homes.
“It is, is when regular people, people who aren't trained in the arts, they have materials that are laying around, and they organise it in such a way that it kind of reflects their ideas about, about, you know, sort of systems of maybe create creation systems, belief systems related to religion, or even anxiety… It's always a kind of boundary space but once this boundary space that's embellished, to give the identity or the belief structure of that individual,” Ward explained over video chat.
Elements of this inspiration are visible in Jamaican born, New York based Ward’s work from the collection, reuse and reappropriation of materials to the organic processes of assemblage which can take place long after a work might be ‘finished’ in the traditional sense. This can take mean either physically altering the work or staging performances in the work or collaboratively including works in performance and dance. He has staged works at New York’s Dance Space. He is also inspired by the questions it raises about who the art an artist of any level makes the art is for.
Balance Fountain, 2013-14 the work at the centre of Ward’s show of the same name at Lehman Maupin in London has all these elements. A Barrow, placed on copper tiles, marked through a secret method of corrosion with items that resonate with Ward’s practice–rosaries, keys– and placed on top, a barrow filled with objects. This was then activated by dancers who he gave free reign in how their made and approached their performance and said this was a very important to his practice
This element of letting go and experimentation is also key to Ward’s practice, he uses sugar and soda to alter materials like in the work Empire, 2023 in which he applied Tropical Fantasy soda (rumoured to be manufactured by the KKK) to balls of cotton, again altering their surface over time. Encased in an old, glass fronted display cabinet, painted black the work feels like a momento mori.
There is protest throughout the work both in the text work This Little Light of Mine and the drawing, Peace Walk: Rally, 2023, a mix of lines, almost shooting stars and nails, gathered central points. This idea of bringing light in runs throughout the exhibition from the scoring of the copper materials used throughout the show to using the natural light in the domestic setting of Cromwell Place.
“It's between like the intimate intimacy of materiality and the image, or the surface, and the volume and the notion of the taking on the volume of the space,” Ward explains. “I was happy to engage with the promo space because it didn't demand the big challenge of claiming volume, like, owning that space? Because it's such an intimate, domestic space, allowing me to even double down on the intimacy.”
While this scale is at the opposite end to some of the Ward’s works which can only be called monumental, which will be explored in a show at Milan’s Hangar Bicocca next spring, they always retain the mark of the hand making them at once overwhelming and intimate in their presentation often uses and adapts found objects and reuses materials.
“I can't be as I have to really consider spaces as material and considering spaces as materials, then I have to really think about like, what is that distance and ask, when you get closer, what am I giving the viewer, what is the reward for them to want to approach it and spend time in it?”
These elements could present as contradictions but these combined elements of concept, process, sale and the rejection of the finite end of a work of art come together in a way that is inviting and warm despite their layered complexity.
Nari Ward: Balance Fountain until January 6, 2024. Lehmann Maupin London
