Andrea Ward
Artifacts for Generation X: Project #3 in the Project Room
Installation

Canadian Artist
Brochure: Project Room Series (1992-1993)

MEDIA RELEASE

Artifacts from Generation X, opens on March 6 at 3pm and continues through March 27, 1993. This is the third in a series of site-specfic works created for the Project Room.

In her installation Artifacts from Generation X, Andrea Ward explores ideas about memory, collections and personal history. As well, she investigates and how we remake the image of ourselves over time. Ward's classification and archival methodology is employed not only as a means of conserving fragments and details of her life but also as an assertion of her own existence.

The installation incorporates 27 glass jars which contain small toys, drawings, report cards and photographs from Wards's life. As a young girl, Ward began collecting these objects. She then concealed the objects in jars, and then buried them in the ravine behind her house. She vividly remembers apocalyptic television images of exploding atomic bombs, bloody murders and recalls that she believed that hiding these fragments of her life in the ground, would somehow ensure her existence beyond death.

In 1987, Ward unearthed and restored some of these buried objects. In creating the installation Artifacts from Generation X, she has reorganised the contents chronologically and has placed them in pickle jars, one for each year of her life. The jars appear on ornate mahogany shelves which circle the room. As part of an ongoing project, a new jar is constructed for each year that passes.

Andrea Ward was born in Oxford, England. She studied both at the Ontario College of Art and the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Currently on display at A Space in Toronto until April 4 is Hairstories. Hairstories, along with an upcoming exhibition Memories within Skin (a installation concerning women's transformation of identity in relation to cosmetic surgery) will be travelling to seven galleries in Canada including Memorial University, Newfoundland, Neutral Ground, Regina and St. Mary's Art Gallery, Halifax.

Mercer Union has produced a publication in conjunction with each of the Project Room exhibitions.