Press release
Nari Ward
IDLE/DRIFT
20 November 1994 – 1 January
1995
Last May, Nari Ward came to the Magasin as an artist-in-residence
for several months. The current exhibition is a site-specific installation
of work made during the artist's stay in Grenoble, entitled "Idle/Drift".
The title of the work contains the paradoxical idea of movement (drift) of
an undirected and passive sort, and fixity (idle). Constructed from recuperated
materials--rusted bedsprings, car tires, oil drums, canned goods, card board
boxes, metal barrier, charred wood--mostly collected from the Bouchayer-Viallet
industrial site where the Magasin is located, Ward's installation addresses
memory-his own as a child in Jamaica-and memory as an intangible experience.
Through the process of tedious, repetitive gestures in building up the work,
Ward sought to reexperience the emotional rather than just the visual aspect
of childhood memories. Objects contained within the work are ladened with metaphors
of movement and transport-not incidental to an island nation-and are symbolic
references to those recollections.
The exhibition space itself is conceived
of as a field of discovery and wonderment. The walls and ceiling of the exhibition
space are completely covered with cardboard from fruit and vegetable boxes,
each bearing the name of a country of origin. Upon entering the installation,
the viewer is confronted with three boat-like forms, symbolic of transportation-physical
and mental.
Dispersed over the floor are bedsprings compressed into bundles
which offer themselves as obstacles to the viewer's progress through the installation.
Beyond, open oil drums are packed with springs and canned goods covered in
grease-at once lubricating the food products, as if meant to be mobile, and
fossilizing them in a "still life". Inert tension is also implied
in the installation's dominate object an enormous stationary wheel built from
layers of tire scraps. The circular form of the wheel and the use of charred
wood-evidence of fire-connotates renewal for Ward, as does ingenuity--the reapplication
and reuse of found material and its transformation into metaphor.
Nari
Ward, born in 1963 in Kingston, Jamaica, lives and works
in New York. He was included in "Aperto" at the last Venice Biennial,
in 1993 he exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and
next May his work can be seen in the Whitney Museum of American Art's Biennial.