Rebecca Ward: "vector specter"
By Ekin Erkan
April 30, 2025
Rebecca Ward’s exhibition vector specter at Peter Blum Gallery includes ten works, the majority of which were executed in 2025. The works reconfigure canvas planes, with Ward assembling and layering geometric gradients, each constituent piece uniform in palette but quilted to often complementary though sometimes contrasting colored forms. bite marks and bite marks II, for instance, posit an array of parallelogram strips and semi-circular elements, enclosed by stretcher bars, each parcel a distinct cardinal tone. The shifting red spectra, moving from plum to vermillion to cyan, suggests the uneven trade of sunlight with shadow. phenomenomena repeats this palette-based convention, ribboning caliginous cerulean shades to lapis bands and sky-blue masts. The diptych, fast asleep, cues a charcoal black blanket, the lower gray-tumbled rectilinear meted out by watercolor matte fragments. In these works, the strips and apportionments are each dyed different values, such that the stitched canvas is, ultimately, riven by a range of values from a select color, with no particular pattern or orderliness at play.
open secret is the exception. The moss-cyan heaves from below, the beclouded gray-green strips comprising the lower pictorial field, which quickens into twin undulating mounds, one adumbrated by an identically shaped but much fainter secondary embankment. Here, there is a sense of weightiness that is absent in most of Ward’s varicolored patchworks. These single-palette but varitoned pieces are the most optically pleasing and, in turn, the most beautiful works on view. The arrangements that purpose juxtaposition enjoy less cohesion. In soft landing (2024), abutments of peach are crenelated by a stack of gray oblong fragments, the lower horizontals cleaved by fogged aquamarine planes and mauve fillets. Where, in the all-vermillion, -azure, and -charcoal constructions, planes smoothly converge, one overtaking the next like layered organza, the three mixed-palette arrangements enjoy diminished uniformity.
The variegated linen and canvas works, fastened in a geometric patchwork, may, at first pass, invite connotations to labor traditionally associated with women, such as sewing and embroidery. But there are no seams to be found between the fabric elements. Ward’s form-based Minimalist vernacular of neatly puzzling pieces together hews closer to Mary Lum’s flat eave collages, Agnes Martin’s predominantly monochromatic color fields, and Charles Biederman’s “Structurist” reliefs. In their smoothness, Ward’s constructions do not readily permit sartorial connotations. There are no indices of needlepoint, tapestry, lace or brocade that might suggest these linens and canvases are repurposed from garments once donned. Even closely viewed, there are no seams to be espied in Ward’s orderly stitch-work. Consider shy guy’s contrasting apportionments, hoary embankments bookended by flattened matte minarets and bottomed out by a rolled-over inverted sand knoll. Although there is significant variety in palette, each constituent piece is smoothly fitted together. Thus, even where forms contrast in color, their silhouettes sink into one another’s edges.
The meaning of Ward’s textile series, though not vestiary, is not entirely unrelated to bodily forms. During her 2017 FLAG Art foundation exhibition, Ward’s artist statement quoted a passage from Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text (1973) identifying “the most erotic portion of a body” with “where the garment gapes” and the “intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing.” In 2022 works like beast, Ward trafficked in such interstitial corporeal forms. Geometrically dissolving the eponymous breasts into two semicircles, the geometric work is reminiscent of Tom Wesselmann’s “Great American Nude” series, albeit more closely cropped to create heightened anonymity. If the breasts were sufficiently recognizable as bodily, it was due to a sense of palette-based depth, the orange background hill-cum-breast seemingly shadow-struck by the foregrounded mound. In Ward’s 2024 suite of works, however, bodily indices are only offered in slight glimpses and short fragments, making the series more formalist an endeavor. This formalism distinguishes Ward from other artists who have turned the canvas into a textile object, as they have, inevitably, rendered it immediately sculptural. For instance, beginning in 1962, Dan Basen executed a series of “Head” sculptures by suturing and folding strips of canvas over wooden planks, creating Cubist-inspired busts where canvas became flesh. Even when stapled to the backing board, the heads enjoyed spatial protrusion. There is no such protrusion in Ward’s works, however, such that, despite their fabric-based materiality, they appear flat, occupying a uniform plane.
To countenance Ward’s acrylic and dye on stitched canvas and linen works as, foremost, painterly (though not paintings, proper) may initially strike one as odd given her textile source material. However, as Johann Gottfried Herder first elaborated in his 1778 essay “Sculpture: Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream,” and as Herbert Read echoes in The Art of Sculpture (1964), sculpture is a medium whose essence exists “in the round,” galvanizing our imaginative engagement in terms of tactile space and depth rather than that which is optically arrayed across a uniformly present surface. Indeed, as Herder notes, a sculpture enjoys as many viewpoints as there can be possible points drawn around it, with the sculptural percipient’s imagination consequently tasked to combine these and imagine something unified. In turn, we recognize a sculptural body not as a discrete plurality of surfaces but by assimilating and coordinating the information given through our eyes, drawing upon the knowledge of mass, volume, and three-dimensional forms that we derive from our sense of touch. Recognition of the sculptural form is conditioned upon tactile knowledge, which is why Herder writes that “[t]he living, embodied truth of the three-dimensional space of angles, of form and volume, is not something we can learn through sight.” In Ward’s patchwork, there is no unification of viewpoints to be had. We can only view the works head-on. Yet there is a sculptural element in Ward’s works, insofar as sculpture is also, as Read writes, “an art of palpitations—an art that gives satisfaction in the touching and handling of objects.” Specifically, Ward’s “palpitations” tremble in the fabric squares and rectangles that constitute the right-most or bottom strips in her constructions. There is one such element in each work and, unless intimately viewed, it almost remains hidden. Bereft of vertical warp threads, these bands allot the passage of light, slightly revealing the wall below. It is here that the work becomes sculptural, its relative contiguity to the painterly elements inviting consideration of what distinguishes the two media. Ward is clearly interested the issue of medium specificity, noting to Jonathan Rider in a 2021 conversation that:
"I think painting’s definition has grown to accommodate more than just paint on a flat canvas . . . It can be both [painting and sculpture]. I do, however, like this romanticized leaning of Greenberg’s argument . . . . Most of my paintings are relatively flat and the awareness of that flat plane does heighten your attention to other dimensions."
In letting light pass through these warp-less threads, Ward recalls Herder’s adage that the sculpture “does not stand in light, it creates its own light” and that it “is not placed in space, it creates its own space.” This conceptual achievement is, more than the single-palette constructions’ beauty, Ward’s true triumph with this series.