What is my work about?
I rely on analog camerawork to slow and expand a dialog with people, places, identities, and objects I want to learn from. My multi-image installations and essays are a way to work through the complexity of the world around me using figurative allegory and symphonic sprawl to process the metaphorical potential of my immediate experience into new photographic fiction. Through trial and error, placing and replacing one image next to another, I search for the spaces that resonate between photographic narrative fragments and have the potential to evolve into imagined histories.
Artist Statement
I once photographed two teenage ROTC cadets manning a sawhorse barricade in a small town. I asked them what they planned to do, militarily speaking. One would ship out three months after high-school graduation and roll on a tank in Iraq. The other joked that his sergeant told him he would grow up to be a bullet catcher.
When it comes to the American landscape, I’m seduced by the idea of the Bullet Catcher. I want to learn from the pathetic parts of pride, the kind of people who go it alone out of a sense of self-preservation, the ecstatic abandon, the hard-headed desire for glory or simple significance, the absurd, the casually erotic, the numbness of loss, and the many ways we discard people, history and place. Drawing on an ever-growing collection of original photographs, my multi-image installations reimagine and recontextualize these themes. As the series continues to evolve, a map of intertwined American histories emerges in a space somewhere between dreams, memories, and the rolling tide of everyday life.
I have also included images from a series called Patches. This essay is about my relationship to a space where deep sadness and optimism are fully interdependent. In these photographs of Israel, I explore provisional monuments, a kind of patchwork maintenance, and some tenuous and hastily woven myths of identity, permanence, and place.
Both my multi-image installations and photographic essays raise questions about the efficacy and objective posturing of documentary practice, the conceptual and sculptural failures of static linearity in photographic display, and the ways that representational photographic work can drive the movement of people through both physical and psychological space. I’m interested in exploring and expanding the ability of photographs to generate a devastating intensity of internal experience.
CV
EDUCATION
2013 MFA, Columbia University
2006 BFA, New York University
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2014
Americana, International Photography Festival, Tel Aviv, Israel
Pyramid Scheme, Brooklyn, NY
2013
Come Together, Surviving Sandy Year One, Brooklyn, NY
Jew York, Untitled Gallery & Zach Feuer Gallery, New York, NY
Fishing in the Dark, Violet’s Cafe, Brooklyn, NY
No Picture, No Name, Galerie Protoge, New York, NY
MFA Thesis Exhibition, The Fischer Landau Center, Long Island City, NY
2012
Home Goods, CTSQ, Long Island City, NY
Small Works, Magenta Festival, Boston, MA
2011
Dirty Pictures, Hungry Man Gallery, San Francisco, CA
The Collectors Guide to New Art Photography Exhibition, New York, NY
RESIDENCIES
2012
A-Z West Wagon Station Encampment with Andrea Zittel, Joshua Tree, CA
SELECTED PRESS
2014
“Nat Ward,” Dust Magazine
“The United States,” Mossless
2013
“Interleaves,” Orenbeg Press
“2013 Columbia MFA Thesis Exhibition Favorite: Nat Ward”, Whitewall Magazine
2011
“Dirty Pictures,” San Francisco Chronicle
“The Collector’s Guide to New Art Photography, Vol. 2,” HAFNY
PANELS & LECTURES
2014
“Contemporary American Photography,” International Photography Festival, Tel Aviv, Israel
2012
“New Fiction,” University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC
“A Perfoming Apparatus: Photography and the Body,” Columbia University, New York, NY