Rebecca Ward

Rebecca Ward continues to investigate painting’s multifaceted relationships with object, craft, and dimensionality primarily through deconstructed and sewn canvases. Emphasizing materiality and process, a distinct visual language and formal ambiguity permeates the artist’s works. Ward has expanded her vernacular to include curving and organic forms alongside the hard-edged. Although not direct depictions, she connects abstraction to both the corporeal and the mathematical, with diverse sources of inspiration. These elements coalesce into a spatial play of harmonious proportions and tones that suggest the mirroring of human and natural phenomena. She converges cut planes of painted and dyed canvas at machine-sewn seams that both physically combine and divide the compositions. Creating exuberant environments of grassy greens, silky violets, or variegated maroons, foreground and background are accentuated by lighter washes or raw canvas contrasting with saturated tones. These sections give way to an unraveling of the overall picture in the paintings where she methodically removes sections of horizontal threads. Revealing and obscuring the underlying stretcher bars, Ward emphasizes the multidimensional structure of painting beyond its surface and highlights the structural elements that make it possible.