flood (2022), acrylic and dye on stitched canvas; courtesy of SITE Santa Fe

before and after (2022), acrylic and dye on stitched canvas; courtesy of SITE Santa Fe

beast (2022), acrylic and dye on stitched canvas; courtesy of SITE Santa Fe

flood (2022), acrylic and dye on stitched canvas; courtesy of SITE Santa Fe

▼ Rebecca Ward: distance to venus

▼ SITE Santa Fe, 1606 Paseo de Peralta

▼ Free; 505-989-1199, sitesantafe.org

Lines rise and fall in series of peaks and valleys on a given chart or graph, forming arcs and curves with greater or lesser degrees of sharpness and height. Looking at COVID-era pandemic graphs can be harrowing. But, during the period of shutdowns, many of us did just that, focusing on the data, not the shapes: those lines, ascending and descending, angular and sharp, curvilinear and smooth as rolling hills.

“We’d spent a lot of time over the past few years looking at graphs with ups and downs of the pandemic, the stock market, or whatever the graph was,” says multimedia artist Rebecca Ward. “We’re inundated with these lines, and I was thinking about how these lines reflect so many shapes in our lives. They’re reflective of landscapes and our bodies.”

Ward is a Brooklyn-based artist who creates canvases that are flat but shaped, as well as banded, sewn, and deconstructed. Her work lies at an intersection of painting and sculpture, and she’s driven by an interest in experimentation with process and materials, which is often reflected in a completed artwork. She’ll expose the stretcher bars in a work on canvas, for instance, or deconstruct a canvas and resew them. This hands-on manner of working dovetails with her interest in geometric abstraction and the possibilities for shapes and forms on an x/y axis in distance to venus (through Nov. 7).

The exhibition, number 17 in SITE Santa Fe’s SITElab series, is a selection of recent works that Ward made between 2021 and 2022.

before and after (2022), acrylic and dye on stitched canvas; courtesy of SITE Santa Fe

Combining elements of hard-edge abstraction that delineate shapes, these wall-mounted three-dimensional works of curving forms suggest a landscape’s hilly terrain or the gentle curve of a shoulder, waist, or hip, perhaps, or the swelling belly of someone experiencing the various stages of pregnancy.

With their sensual curves and rich tones, the work builds from, but also contrasts with, Ward’s previous sharper use of angular forms and paler color palettes.

“More recently, I’m making the works more autobiographical,” says Ward, who’s 38. “Sometimes specific shapes — that could be multiple things — take on a narrative that maybe they didn’t before. I am always trying to work in this space of ambiguity, because I think something’s at its best when it can be more than one thing.”

Ward transformed a personal experience into a series of abstractions for the body of work on exhibit. Behind her material process is the mental process and all the threads that tie into her own subjective exploration of these curvilinear forms.

“I’m about two years into parenting,” she says. “It was a dramatically different experience, I think, going through pregnancy, childbirth, and motherhood as a queer person. There’s always this emphasis in motherhood on femininity. I think the pregnant body is very female at its core. There’s almost a certain amount of pressure to be this perfect feminine embodiment of childbearing and caretaking. That’s too much pressure in a lot of ways.”

beast (2022), acrylic and dye on stitched canvas; courtesy of SITE Santa Fe

The exhibition’s title invites multiple interpretations. Venus is both a celestial object and an archetypal figure of myth. In terms of her celestial namesake, Venus’ average distance from Earth is more than 100 million miles. Aphrodite, as she was known in Greek myth, embodied love, lust, beauty, passion, and procreation — things we still associate with the feminine mystique.

“She’s the quintessential female archetype,” Ward says. “I wanted to position myself at a distance from that and show it as almost this unobtainable goal.”

Ward was born in Waco, Texas, and earned a BA in studio arts from the University of Texas at Austin in 2006. She worked in video at first then transitioned into sculpture classes. She moved to New York to attend graduate school, earning her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in 2012. She came into the city as a sculptor.

“At heart, I’ve been a sculptor for a long time, even though I don’t make them right now. But I did kind of come at painting from the angle of sculpture.”

The transition from working in one artistic form and merging it with another one was driven, in part, by necessity. She was working in a cramped studio space with materials that were difficult to transport through the busy city streets. Additionally, her fellow students, she says, were mostly into painting.

“There was a big argument in school about whether something was a painting or a sculpture. I’ve always felt that it can be both. I was never schooled in painting, so I taught myself to apply paint with a brush.”

“Sometimes specific shapes — that could be multiple things — take on a narrative that maybe they didn’t before. I am always trying to work in this space of ambiguity, because I think something’s at its best when it can be more than one thing.”  — Rebecca Ward

From there, Ward began experimenting with different ways of applying paint (using a mop head, for instance) and how a painting could be created as something more sculptural than two dimensional.

“I thought, even the stretcher bars themselves are these interesting and beautiful three-dimensional objects,” she says. “I was seeing a lot of exhibitions and shows around Chelsea at the time. I loved looking at artists who were working with shaped canvases, like Frank Stella. He was a big influence. I was in a show after grad school called The Shaped Canvas, Revisited. It referenced an exhibition from the 1960s that happened in New York and focused on the shaped canvas.”

The Shaped Canvas, which opened at the Guggenheim in 1964, was a seminal exhibition in which Stella and artists Paul Feeley, Sven Lukin, Richard Smith, and Neil Williams presented work that rejected the pictorial and narrative aspects of traditional painting compositions and rejected two-dimensional abstraction as well in favor of abstracting the working material itself.

The Shaped Canvas, Revisited (2014) was a cross-generational survey of works in the genre, including some by original The Shaped Canvas artists such as Stella and other prominent artists associated with the art form, such as Lynda Benglis, Damien Hirst, and Roy Lichtenstein.

“All of those artists looked at painting from the perspective of sculpture,” says Ward, whose recent work is reminiscent of painting while also being textile based. “A few years ago I was making paintings on silk. There’s this idea of transparency in all of my works, and silk was a material that allowed me to play with that.”

In a way, artists like Ward, who transform an art form like painting from the inside out, aren’t just rejecting the traditional or typical painting format, but acknowledging art’s deficiencies.

“With an artwork, you’re always trying to obtain this idea of perfection, and it’s never quite possible.”

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