Featured Artists
Sean Ward
Sean Ward’s imagination is an arcade of noise, color, and endless ideas chasing each other down and beating each other into submission. In the past, his hyperreal sensibilities have run the gamut of everything from performance art involving several guys humping a giant foam head to Cabbage-Patch-like monsters made out of pantyhose to a faux volcano that smoked out a gallery opening. Now he’s trying to buckle down that energy on canvas with sublimely freakish portraits and interior landscapes that wrestle between formal aesthetic beauty and horror movie madness!
His interest in the grotesque is more of a love of its limitless creative potential than a testosterone-fueled fascination. “I like what horror allows the figure to do ... you can rip the arm off and put it somewhere completely different, disfigure the body,” he explained.
Ward is also interested in showing viewers that the world is flooded with startling imagery and ideas found in everyday advertising: junk mail inserts, store catalogs, product packaging. “There’s some kick-ass stuff in that trash,” he once said.
For example, in Portraits 3 & 4 Ward excerpts a tiny picture from the package of a Halloween mask purchased at K-mart and glorifies it on a huge canvas with roaring detail. The result is a magnificent rock-star zombie reminiscent of the character Sloth from the 1980s movie Goonies. It is this type of content that epitomizes Ward’s work: funny, intriguing, and gratuitous all at the same time, electrified by color, depth and form. In Apparent Monster Hands, another image borrowed from a Halloween costume, scaly green hands exude flesh-colored fingertips, suggesting a human presence growing out of dimestore ugliness, an attempt to grasp what we normally cast off as temporary or unattractive and somehow make it useful.
With his unabashed love of accessible, disposable imagery and visual landfill, Ward proves that you can never run out of ideas because they exist in the very fabric that makes up our daily cultural landscapes.
Born
-1975 Eastern Long Island, NY
Lives and works in Eugene, OR.
Education
-2000 B.F.A. degree, Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, M.O.
Solo Exhibitions
-2006 New Sixty Five Inch Paintings and Then Some, Rare Gallery, New York, NY.
-2000 Art is Not My Friend; It Hurts Sean Ward’s Feelings, Kelvin Gallery, Kansas City, MO.
Group Exhibitions
-2007 Whoop Dee Doo: Kansas City Loves You, Getsumin Gallery, Osaka, Japan.
Truck: KC/STL Exchange, White Flag Projects, St.Louis, MO.
Woo Dee Doo: Beating Dead Horses, BCAS, St. Louis, MO.
-2006 Whoop Dee Doo: Kans-a-can-can, Greenlease Gallery, Kansas City, MO.
Whoop Dee Doo: Kansas City’s Big Night on the Town, Rocket Projects, Miami, FL.
Scope International Contemporary Art Fair, New York, NY.
-2005 Charlotte St. Awards Exhibition, JCCC-Gallery of Art, Overland Park, KS.
What’s the Matter With Kansas, Rare Gallery, New York, NY.
Fat Monks and Baby Rabbits, Leedy-Voukos Art Center, Kansas City, MO.
What is Your Conceptual Continuity, Rare Gallery, New York, NY.
-2004 Scope International Contemporary Art Fair, Miami, FL.
Sloppy Slobbering Monster, The Bank, Kansas City, MO.
Thanks for Not Being a Zombie, Paragraph, Kansas City, MO.
We Make Our Own Fun, Guild & Greyshkul, New York, NY.
-2003 Tears of a Dude, George Caleb Bingham Gallery, University of Missouri,Columbia, MO.
We’re Desperate, Your Face, Kansas City, MO.
-2001 Looking for Robert Longo and Other Possibilities, Dolphin, Kansas City, MO.
Kansas City Chapter of NSAL, Sculpture Comp., Leedy-Voukos Gallery, MO.
Awards
2005 Charlotte Street Foundation Award
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