SANTA FE, NM.- SITE Santa Fe is presenting a new solo SITElab exhibition by Rebecca Ward, entitled distance to venus, from September 1 through November 5, 2022. This exhibition showcases Ward’s ground-breaking work at the intersection of painting and sculpture through a selection of recent work (2021-2022) tracing the transformative phases of pregnancy and childbirth through the language of geometry, materiality, and abstraction.
“Rebecca brings depth of feeling to the formal precision of geometric abstraction. Her labored approach to painting involves deconstructing and reconstructing her canvases. Her process involves sewing cut planes of painted and dyed canvas together and removing sections of the weft—revealing the underlying stretcher bars— emphasizing the structure of the painting beyond its surface,” says curator Brandee Caoba.
Expanding upon her previous works displaying hard angles and straight lines, the fourteen works in this exhibition employ undulating curves to evoke both the landscape and an idealized, if abstracted, female form.
Drawing from the artist’s experience as a queer person experiencing motherhood, the body of work explores the relationship between the archetype of the female goddess, the changing human body, landscape, mathematics, and celestial phenomena.
The exhibition coincides with the release of a monograph entitled before & after, which includes a conversation with SITE Santa Fe curator Brandee Caoba.
Rebecca Ward (b. 1984, Waco, TX) earned a BA at the University of Texas, Austin (2006) and an MFA at the School of the Visual Arts, New York (2012). She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Museum exhibitions include Fresh Faces from the Rachofsky Collection, Site 131, Dallas, TX (2021); Over & Over, Columbia College, Chicago, IL (2018); Rebecca Ward, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2017); Eastwing Biennial: Artificial Realities, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, UK (2016); Making & Unmaking, Camden Art Centre, London, UK (2016); The Tim Sayer Bequest, The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK (2016); Space Between, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2015); Linear Abstraction, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA (2015); and Rebecca Ward: indulgences, Exchiesetta, Polignano a Mare, Italy (2015). Ward is the subject of a monograph of her exhibition at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2021). Residencies include Shandaken: Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2016); and Atelier Alighiero Boetti, Todi, Italy (2013).
