ZOOM LINK (CLICK)
Join Curator Mike Calway-Fagen, and Education Consultant, Josiah Golson, in the Studio with Shane Ward Friday, May 22nd at 5 PM EST. Shane was a participating artist in the exhibition Dreamt Dark Days, which was the fourth exhibition in our LAND AND SEA series.
About Shane:
Shane Ward earned his BFA from the University of Kentucky and his MFA in Sculpture from the University of Chicago. Shane has exhibited work both nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Sector 2337, the Hyde Park Art Center, and the Overgaden Museum of Contemporary Art. Shane has also participated in numerous artist residencies including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, NES Residency of Iceland, and the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative. He has taught sculpture for multiple institutions including the Paducah School of Art and Design, Whitman College, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Shane’s interdisciplinary practice is currently dedicated to themes of war and romance, capital and masculinity, violence and depth, surface luster and value. His work pursues the relationship between the grave and the monument, the mine and the jewelry box, the wound, and the mend. His most recent work is a sustained inquiry into the nature of victory, its relationship to liberty, and its ultimate fragility.
Artist Statement:
A possible encounter: You would say it is more like teeth than bone as your tongue rings your inside bottom row, but your metal fillings distract you from deciding. The amalgam in your third molar, you remember, is a composite of periodic coinage metals. Jefferson and Lincoln embrace your back grinder; immortal liberty fights decay. I am investigating material histories, attempting to pick out meaning lodged therein. It’s an ordering, if also disordering, of complex value systems, the necessities of which are mere contingencies, accidents, vicissitudes, at heart extrinsic, and constitutionally unstable. The terms of value denominating privilege, wealth, exploitation, and emancipation run deep. These are matters of taste and a condition of power, the sleights and slights of an invisible hand. At the core, political agendas heat and cool as utilitarian objects are converted from their finished states into raw material. Hundreds of Miller High Life cans bearing the campaign slogan, “Give a Veteran a Piece of the High Life”, teams of baseball bats, handfuls of pennies, and pairs of aluminum crutches are melted, mixed, and cast forth. I am preparing for an American romance. I am trying to talk about war. We are disaffected by preciousness, yet it’s preciousness (as an aesthetic category?) that holds fast. We grasp; we clutch. How do you know if it’s counterfeit? Put it in your mouth. Bite it. The nickel in your filling bears Thomas Jefferson’s inverted profile. This is the bubblegum treasury. You chew. You pop. You burst.
www.becomingshaneward.com