Gallery Talk: Thursday, February 3 at 1 p.m. in the Art Gallery
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 3 from 4:30 - 6 p.m.
While “in-residence” in my South Florida apartment during the pandemic, I started looking and researching the tropical light that cascades on our beautiful intercostal waterways and the Everglades. Marjorie Stoneman Douglas wrote that the “miracle” of this light “pours over the green and brown expanse of saw grass and of water, shining and slow-moving below, the grass and water that is the meaning and the central fact of the Everglades of Florida. It is a river of grass.” During the pandemic, I drove through the Everglades often to Naples to check on my elderly father.
The healing light of the Everglades illuminated my new works, which encompass photography and underwater video and feature quiet ripples of light moving through the water.
Artist Bio
Ward’s work embraces the shift from the physically laborious raw materiality of an iron sculptor to the contemporary technologies of the cool blue screen. In addition to material shifts, she risks exploring collaborative making by inclusion of a variety of art forms and artists, such as musicians, to trace experience beyond the visual. Conceptually, Ward’s work folds in the remnants of vanishing industrial practices. The fading past and rapidly evolving present occupy the striated spaces of history giving us glimpses of the spaces between parallel worlds: between past and present, between old and new, between traditional and contemporary, between the material and the ephemeral. Ward graduated from The Ohio State University in 2010 with an MFA in Sculpture. In 2014 Ward completed a second MFA in Electronic Media from the University of Cincinnati’s department of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning. Julie is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL.
This exhibition and events are generously sponsored by the Ballantine Visiting Artist Fund.