Patrick Ward

Installation view of “Monologue”, 2009

Installation view of “Monologue”, 2009

Installation view of “Monologue”, 2009

Installation view of “Monologue”, 2009

Installation view of “Monologue”, 2009

Monologue is constructed using footage taken from various online video-sharing websites. The footage is edited to create an illusion of a single, uncut, point-of-view shot, that navigates a seemingly unending and constantly shifting architectural space. The lack of any onscreen protagonist allows the architecture to work as a device that simultaneously conceals and reveals the editing process: the cuts are concealed by continuity on a structural level (doors, walls, floors etc allow for a seamless join) but are revealed through the juxtapositions of incongruent architectural styles. The impossibility of the architectural space serves to reveal the apparently ‘invisible’ edits and demonstrates just how treacherous a sense of continuity can be.

Installation view of “This Is It”, Weimar

Installation view of “This Is It”, Ljubljana

There is a good chance (guaranteed, in fact, by aspects of Ward’s work) that we will not see or hear everything. A neon sign announces, “This is it”. Ward’s piece is viewed (if at all) from a window: it is ‘outside’ and we might well miss noticing it. Only a discreet label on the window frame – ‘inside’ – identifies it. The work exists both within and without, but on different terms, not here or there. And, however unambiguous a statement as “This is it” might appear to be, what is actually being signified is anything but. At its most basic, of course, the sign refers to itself, but it also seems to refer to something else from which it is now detached. In Freudian terms, we might regard This is it as a ‘partial object’. This is not to say that it should be thought of as a constituent part of a ‘whole’ from which it has been removed, but rather as something that resists its inclusion within that ‘whole’. Rather than being subordinate to a referent, the sign is beyond this and that.

—Sam Gathercole

Eight still images from “In Order of Appearance”, 2007

Patrick Ward’s In Order of Appearance (2007) presents a looped series of the moments when one VHS recording ends to reveal an older recording ‘underneath’ it. When one recording is stopped, the anomalies or limits of the standard VHS system do not allow for a ‘clean’ join with existing recordings on the tape. Rather, one slowly distorts and dissolves towards a snowy screen that then gradually reveals the emergence of the next (or, more accurately, the previous). What are joined in In Order of Appearance are the final moments of film credit sequences. As one ends, what begins is the ending of the next, and so it goes on. Through In Order of Appearance the cut is made material: it is the object that is linked by all else. We find ourselves perpetually between things, but to suggest that the cut has simply replaced the what-is-joined is to ignore the complexities and contradictions of what is being performed. […]

—Sam Gathercole
Patrick Ward, exhibition catalogue
Mala galerija, Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2007

Installation view of “Last Scene”, 2003

In Last Scene, Patrick Ward constructs a sound collage of voices cut from film soundtracks. Disembodied and detached from their context, these voices nevertheless retain and convey the anxiety of their on-screen origins. Relocated and reassembled in a seemingly indeterminate and purgatorial space, the “found” voices are heard calling out the names of lost companions. Some of the voices seem roused by a sense of the presence or proximity of others; some are more distant and speculative. In all cases, these ill-fated calls have become trapped in a space of that no longer facilitates conversation.

From Telephone press release, October 2008

Installation view of “Unidentified Backgrounds”, 2004

One of a series of five Lambda prints from “Unidentified Backgrounds”, 2004

Installation view of “Unidentified Backgrounds”, 2004

One of a series of five Lambda prints from “Unidentified Backgrounds”, 2004

One of a series of five Lambda prints from “Unidentified Backgrounds”, 2004

The five photographs which Patrick Ward includes in his series Unidentified Backgrounds reveal precisely that; anonymous landscapes in which nothing much seems to be taking place. They are technically rather poor, while the one thing they have in common is an unusually wide expanse of sky; they might be the very negation of narrative. And yet these images once played a staring role in one of the most popular contemporary narrative codes, since they are snap shots of UFOs – except that Ward has digitally removed the flying objects, leaving the the now mysteriously mute landscapes. […] This it seems, is truly narration’s point zero: stripped down to virtually nothing, it has the perverse effect of stimulating the narrative instinct precisely where it is most powerful: in the audiences imagination.

—John Stathatos
Ways of Telling: Photography and Narrative,
Thessalonki Museum of Photography, 2004, p32–3

Patrick Ward’s Reception explores cinematographic representations of television and video’s imagined paranormal potential. Ward has edited together moments in films in which unknown forces are trying to communicate with a character using a television screen. The scenes in the original films present broadcasts that begin and end with a flicker of a broken image or a burst of on-screen static. The fragments that framed each scene have been edited together to create a looped sequence that plays on our narrative expectations: what was actually seen on the television screens in the original films is missing. The flicker and static that framed the transmission become the content. Establishing shots situate the encounters within an estranged domestic setting leading to a series of mesmerising, nebulous on-screen images of white noise. The work implies an element of external interference which, allied with an ambient soundtrack, becomes an unsettling portent of events unfolding in an unseen narrative.

—Jeanine Griffin
Haunted Media, exhibition catalogue
Site Gallery, Sheffield, UK, 2004

Close-up of page from a modified film directory

Installation view of modified film directories – Mala galerija, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, Slovenia

Installation view of modified film directories – Mala galerija, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, Slovenia

In hiding the accompanying texts someone seems quite keen on dressing up his man in a variety of roles without explaining how their situations expand into a narrative context; ‘their’ stories are transposed into a story in which ‘they’ interact, either disparately through a disjointed sequence of activity, or accumulatively – whereby our man becomes a quick-changing performer, a guide through the guises we ourselves assume in the name of fantasy. As those men become this or that man, identity is reduced to the point of identification, but we’re not escaping with any movie, rather we’re hurried on into the next costume’s demands by the insistent someone who has ensured that their possibilities are revealed to the discerning film buffs who won’t be allowed to get away with any facts. A source of knowledge about fictional situations has been taped down to false starts, someone has deliberately defaced these books and the thought that what has been revealed is nearer to the truth is a disgraceful indictment of the original text. Not to mention a slur on pure escapism.

—Mark Nicholson
‘Something Is Hushed-Up …’
Introduction, exhibition catalogue
S1 Projects, Sheffield, 2002