Ex Nihilo Nihil Fit – Jamie Ward

Press Release
The Maillardville Cultural Appreciation Society is pleased to present a solo exhibition of recent work by Jamie Ward. Ballpoint pen drawings on salvaged substrates, tape compositions and sound arrangements within the exhibition each present ubiquitous and disposable signage whose definition is eradicated by a cumulative energy that precludes the referential impulse. More than simply signs robbed of signification the works posses a musical sensibility, bypassing interpretation and moving instead toward immediate experience. Meaning is abandoned in favour of composition as direct exposure.

Shadows not dark spots
An Italian man named Maurizio Montalbini holds the record for longest time in spent in total isolation, having lived underground for nearly four years throughout his life. When alone, time passed slower, as what he considered days stretched, and his need for sleep withdrew. Though perception is always contingent upon a context it may not take such a grand plunge into obscurity to have it altered. These changes are what we scour our lives for and if lucky, we find them in art when the sense of its artifice dissipates in the face of the experience it generates.
The artificial only becomes worthwhile when its world creates implications in ours, when a cult or a concert is more than just a performance. The artificial could never fit within the investment you made in what I saw as an esoteric brand of knowledge, understanding people like Montalbini. It was not the allure of the obscure but instead the promise that these things may create a space for absorption into the present that made them seem so attractive. Though full emancipation from our referential impulse remains unheard of, it does not stop attempts to circumvent it, if only for a moment. From bypassing synthetic veneers, perhaps by defacement or simply inquiry, we can arrive at the dense and shadowed core they serve to encapsulate. However deeply we manage to penetrate though, the surface still exists and what’s there is there, nothing more. We can’t help that there’s rarely enough room in our minds for others to enter in them.