Location: United States
Eric D Ward, MFA
My work tends to be confrontational yet inviting. I focus on the juxtaposition of contradictory ideas, materials, styles, treatments, processes, and textures in order to discover a balance between extremes, and it is this clash that I am most interested in. Part of my inspiration is derived from living all of my life near the Southern California coast; living on the edge where the land meets the sea, where the vastness of the ocean is surrounded by the sensory overload of civilization.
By using a wide variety of materials and techniques, I seek to convey these extremes (and the tensions among them), to the viewer. I work with various media, styles, and genres that at times overlap within the same piece and/or series of pieces, resulting in what I would refer to as a hybrid. The synthetic as well as natural materials I use are very important to the work. They include wood, rusted metal, sand, sawdust, glass, cement, dirt, stain, gravel, acrylic, resin, nails, nuts and bolts, a variety of pollen and other organic material, and basically anything that is at my disposal. I am also fond of incorporating found objects and icons from various cultures throughout history into my art, sometimes transforming, mutating, and distorting them so that they no longer exist as they did in their original format. This leapfrogging among various media, materials, and styles is due to the joy and challenges I face when experimenting and exploring the extremes, and is what keeps me charged and motivated to keep pursuing the unknown.
Ultimately, I strive to convey the contradiction and clash of the natural and the manufactured, giving new meaning to concepts and objects that may no longer be recognizable in their original format. I attempt to blur the boundaries between art and life, reality and fantasy - to expose and examine the gray area among them. I hope to share these sensations of living on the edge, and the bombardment of sensory overload that often characterizes contemporary life. In the end, my intentions are to raise questions and invite various interpretations while sifting through the quagmire I deal with to get from point A to point B during the journey of life, allowing the viewers to form their own opinions as to the meaning of it all.
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