Ochi Projects is pleased to present an exit from this room and others like it, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles based artist Hana Ward. This is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery and the work will be on view from March 27^th – May 8^th, 2021.

Ward’s newest oil paintings and ceramic works offer a visual narrative for what the artist describes as “a liberation in the mind.” With so much time spent trapped in divergent states this past year, reading and reflecting, watching the news – vacillating between feelings of hopelessness and anticipation – Ward found herself thinking about the experience of transformation, of coming into one’s power – specifically about how this experience might unfold for Black women.

While they stand alone as complete moments, stories and visual metaphors, Ward considers each portrait in the show representative of a step within a psychological journey, the interior woman’s evolution. Self protection, self preservation and contortion in a two-piece present poses that reflect on the physicality of bodies in contemplation and ask what agency remains when bodies are represented. As Choice Market suggests, every choice has a context.

Despite the overall contemplative and wistful mood Ward’s subjects project, there is a sense that these women have come to know how to maneuver through the world. In Where you end and I begin, a figure looks back over her shoulder as she moves towards the landscape and the future – a self-possessed woman who knows her boundaries. The most visibly assertive protagonist in Anakaona (defend the land) is prepared, but patient – she knows how to choose her battles. An indigenous queen of Haiti, then called Ayiti, Anakaona was killed while defending the land from European colonizers in 1504.

Interspersed throughout the exhibition are hand-built ceramic objects that reference domestic interiors. These clocks and vessels are also portraits that offer space, time, and affirmation with titles like ima koso (now is the time) and time heals, time reveals.

Taken individually and as a whole, Ward’s most recent paintings and ceramic works invite viewers to create more loving space within themselves, allowing for the potential to thrive during an otherwise unforgiving and isolating time. Each portrait relays a deeply personal inner metamorphosis that also manifests outwardly, through an individual’s outlook and approach to life, and even possibly, optimistically, as a society at large.

Hana Ward is a painter and ceramicist from Los Angeles, California. She earned a B.A. from Brown University in 2011. Recent solo exhibitions include “what was there all along” at Ochi Projects in Los Angeles, and “sing about me” (2019) at Harun Gallery 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. Ward’s work will be featured in the forthcoming exhibition “Intergalactix: against isolation / contra el aislamiento” curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2021).

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