Ochi Projects is pleased to present what was there all along, artist Hana Ward’s first exhibition with the gallery. This exhibition includes new paintings exploring Ward’s familiar themes of memory, desire, and Black history offering her personal take on the classic formats of landscape, portraiture, and still life.

A number of her paintings, including jucy's and 10th ave swapmeet, reveal the changing landscape of her birthplace and childhood neighborhood as its old form vanishes before her eyes. Using thick paint and layered brush strokes, Ward documents the once ubiquitous but now fast disappearing architecture and commercial signage of the various mom-and-pop shops she grew up seeing around Los Angeles. In a city adept at wiping out entire neighborhoods with developments, freeways or ball parks, leaving no trace of the vibrancy that existed before–Ward works soberly, but reverently, honoring the signs, scenes, and vistas that reflect this rapid change and celebrating the life that existed before gentrification.

Looking specifically at the roughly 5 mile stretch between West Adams and South LA, Ward’s paintings offer a celebration and lamentation—of what was, what is and the resignation of taking one long, last look at what will soon be lost. As she races to preserve her LA in the face of impending erasure, Ward’s work proves to be both archive and prayer.

Hana Ward is a painter and ceramicist from Los Angeles, California. Her paintings often touch on themes of liberation, memory, history and diaspora. Through her landscape paintings, Ward documents focal, yet disappearing parts of her native city while her graphic portraits pay praise to unsung heroes of our collective legacy. Her work has been described as, "sometimes sad, sometimes funny but always intriguingly equivocal” by ArtNews. Ward’s recent solo exhibitions include “sing about me” (2019) in Los Angeles. Recent group exhibitions include “Mutual Friends” (2020) in Oakland, California, “Giant Robot Post-It Show (2019) and “Animating the Archives” (2017) in Los Angeles.