PLANNED PEASANTHOOD
Holly Ward
The Cube
September 16 to November 4, 2017
Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery
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.
Generously sponsored by the Hamber Foundation, Wilson M. Beck Insurance Services (Kamloops) Inc., Jane Irwin and Ross Hill
Holly Ward: Planned Peasanthood
This full colour publication was produced following the exhibition Holly Ward: Planned Peasanthood at the Kamloops Art Gallery September 16 to November 4, 2017. The publication includes work from the exhibition and related works from Ward’s ongoing interdisciplinary project, with a limited edition screen-printed dust-jacket by the artist, with assistance from Wendy Tokaryk, Banff Centre for the Arts.
Holly Ward
Future Farmer, 2017
digital collage
Image courtesy of the Artist
