HESSE FLATOW is pleased to present Much more elusive and even more wonderful, an exhibition of paintings and ceramics by Los Angeles-based artist Hana Ward, marking her first solo presentation with the gallery.
Ward centers her figures in quiet moments of reflection amidst richly hued interiors and landscapes that are seemingly of their own imagining. Despite their tranquility, they are far from passive. Portrayed in an act of perceiving the divine nature of their world, her figures contemplate their relation to it. Whereas earlier bodies of work placed the concept of cultivating one’s consciousness in dialogue with histories of land stewardship, Ward’s recent examinations delve deeper into the metaphysical.
Weaving together ideas from thinkers like Thomas Troward (whose writings laid the foundation for the New Thought Movement), Howard Thurman (philosopher, theologian, and civil rights activist who mentored Martin Luther King, Jr.), and Vandana Shiva (scholar and food sovereignty activist), Ward traces the relationship between our own self-contemplation and an All-originating Spirit.
She describes her paintings and sculptures as her “reflections of an All-originating Spirit as alive (beyond alive, but as life energy itself), responsive, and intelligent. But more than that, they dwell on the realization that my own awareness of it— my thinking about it, my understanding of my relationship to it— brings it to life, or rather, causes its own livingness to grow larger within my life.”
The exhibition’s title is borrowed from a question posed by physicist Amit Goswami in his 1993 book entitled The Self-Aware Universe – “Is the universe only an objectively predictable series of phenomena that humankind can observe and control, or is it much more elusive and even more wonderful?”1 The philosophical view that consciousness creates the material world, and that all beings are fundamentally connected through a universal consciousness informs the shared realities of the figures across Ward’s paintings.
In The cosmos crept in, a girl sitting at a table amidst nocturnal blues and salmon pinks holds a dragon-headed object— a spiritual guardian for transformation and growth. A woman dressed in florals and a man wearing a purple jacket turn away from each other in Spooky Action At A Distance – a quantum phrase describing the entanglement of two particles regardless of how far they have separated. Hope is a potential you cultivate portrays a man looking out on a field, soaking in the magic hour sky that a sunset provides. In The Seed / The Stone, a figure holds a seed as a reminder of the pure, life essence that created everything, and is at the heart of everything, including ourselves.
While her paintings represent an interiority that is at once psychological and corporeal, Ward suggests something greater operating beyond the physical edges of the canvas. With the exception of one who locks eyes with the viewer, all individuals look slightly off frame towards a realm unseen. Ward views these paintings and sculptures as invitations for contemplation, a series of infinite mirrors. As the audience looks at the figures caught in their own gaze, pondering their own being, the viewer too may be led to peer inside themselves and concentrate on their relation to the concepts before them.
In her final remarks at the 2024 Consciousness Symposium, Vandana Shiva shares, “I think opening up to the wonder of Creativity, Consciousness, and Life is the work for staying alive with other life on this planet.”2 Much more elusive and even more wonderful—ten paintings and two sculptures— are twelve invitations from Hana Ward to contemplate that wonder in this world.
1 Goswami, Amit. The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World. New York: Penguin Putnam Inc., 1993, pg. 60.
2 Shiva, Vendana. “The Power of Quantum Thinking.” A Symposium on Consciousness 2024, Kinross, Scotland.
