Author Description

"Planned Peasanthood stems from the artist’s ongoing project The Pavilion, a geodesic dome that Ward is developing in collaboration with the artist Kevin Schmidt as a rural, site-specific facility for artistic research and production. For this exhibition in The Cube, Ward formulates a series of sculptural and two-dimensional works that explore connections between “natural” systems, skill building, self-reliance and artistic agency within late capitalism. With increasing pressures on our environment and the rise of neoliberalism, we are currently seeing unprecedented social, political, ecological and economic circumstances of insecurity. Standing on the precipice of this dramatic change, citizens are increasingly being asked to re-examine their core values and daily behaviours and interactions. Planned Peasanthood is a process-based series of works wherein Ward examines outmoded, pre-modern methods of land-based survival as a means of reclaiming this body of knowledge as a potentially crucial skillset for the coming era. These works resist nostalgic yearnings for days gone by, as with changes in technology these tools no longer are up to the task. Instead, the artist seeks to develop and incorporate distinctly new tools for survival in the present day, such as those that counter facial-recognition and digital tracking strategies. This project presents a series of sculptural propositions regarding our collective future and in doing so offers a productive moment of reflection on our contemporary present."--