Holly Ward
Holly Ward is a Vancouver-based artist. She received her BFA (Interdisciplinary) from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1999 and her MFA (Studio) from the University of Guelph in 2006. She has exhibited in solo exhibitions across Canada at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery (Vancouver), the Or Gallery (Vancouver), and YYZ Gallery (Toronto), amongst others. She has participated in group exhibitions in Canada, England, Mexico, the United States, Norway and South Korea. Her public art project, News of the Whole World (2011), can currently be seen on the exterior of the CBC building in downtown Vancouver. She is represented by Republic Gallery (Vancouver).
HOLLY WARD
June 11–July 23, 2011
Holly Ward’s interdisciplinary practice is centred on ideas surrounding social progress and political power, and serves to examine the role of art within this. In Persistence of Vision, Ward investigates symbolic strategies of resistance and the use of utopian discourse as a starting point for revolution. The exhibition creates a linkage between contemporary spaces of protest and historical representations of the “utopian” city square. Featuring new sculptural and print work, the exhibition is an extension of Ward’s ongoing interest in social engagement and the utopian imaginary.
HELEN CHO, COLLEEN WOLSTENHOLME
June 12–July 16, 2004
Placebo features two artists who use everyday objects and substances to investigate consumption and states of embodiment.
Colleen Wolstenholme’s work uses images of pills and corporate logos found on the internet as sources for projects in sculpture, photography, painting and embroidery. Psychotropic and analgesic medications are charged with a range of social, sexual and cultural content, and Wolstenholme has wed these associations to a range of cultural practices. The history of handicraft informs her labour-intensive petit point reproductions of pharmaceutical logos. Colour photographs and inkjet prints manipulate the branding of pills and other consumed substances, such as cigarettes and alcohol, into patterns suggested by their shapes and clinical effects. From floral motifs to patterns that are reminiscent of molecular structures and constellations, Wolstenholme’s wry work draws upon the distance between the uniform, brightly coloured, text-embossed aesthetic of these goods and remedies, and their function, effect or social significance.
Helen Cho uses the sensual presence of soap and sugar in installations that reflect the permeable and transitional nature of these substances. Luxurious and exuding an overbearing scent, these concentrated and heavily processed materials are manipulated and placed in ephemeral arrangements in relation to the architecture of the gallery. The usual intimacy between soap and body is undercut through paring and grating, and through embedding remnants of everyday life, such as beads and pins. These fossils, when placed in piles of glittering refined sugar, become part of an idealized landscape. Too Sweet! Go Away! evokes the slippery interiors and exteriors of the body and the equally blurred division between the two. Both subtle and extreme, this installation draws upon our familiarity with substances we consume daily, and transforms them, intensifying a sense of absorption, from without and within, of material culture.
HOLLY WARD
June 25, 2011
Holly Ward speaks in conjunction with her exhibition, Persistence of Vision.
Title: Every Force Evolves a Form
Category: Artist Book
Artist: Holly Ward
Writers: Kathleen Ritter, Jeff Derksen, Laura Piasta
Editor: Kim Nguyen
Design: Post Projects
Publisher: Artspeak
Printer: Paper Chase Printing
Year published: 2012
Edition: 200
Pages: 48pp
Cover: Paper
Binding: Perfect Bound
Process: Offset
Features: 26 colour images
Dimensions: 20.5 x 20.5 x 0.5 cm
Weight: 159 g
ISBN: 978 -0-921394-64-8
Price: $6
This catalogue is published in conjunction with Holly Ward’s exhibition Persistence of Vision. It features the artist in conversation with Kathleen Ritter, an extended essay by Jeff Derksen and a text on recreating a glass symphony by Laura Piasta.
Title: Placebo
Category: Exhibition Catalogue
Artist: Helen Cho, Colleen Wolstenholme
Writers: Lorna Brown, Holly Ward
Editor: Artspeak
Design: Robin Michell
Publisher: Artspeak
Year published: 2004
Pages: 15pp
Cover: Paper fold out velcro
Binding: Single Bolt
Process: Offset
Features: 8 colour images
Dimensions: 11 x 11 x 1.5
Weight: 61 g
ISBN: 0-921394-49-7
Price: $4 CDN
Placebo is published on the occasion of a two-person exhibition featuring Helen Cho and Colleen Wolstenholme, which took place at Artspeak between June 12 and July 16, 2004.
A placebo, whether a sugar pill used in clinical trials or an effect of belief upon our perceived experience, stands in for something else in a way similar to the function of representation. In their work, Cho and Wolstenholme draw upon the strategy of substitution to extract the full evocatory potential of materials and images.