Ward’s 60-foot long sculpture was encased in wooden strips, covered with circular elements salvaged from MASS MoCA’s factory past. This duality of seduction and entrapment is key to Ward’s idea of mirage, which as an image both distorts reality and points to a sense of need. Fish are lured into these traps only to get ensnared. The form of Nu Colossus came from a small conical basket-woven fish trap. For Ward, these villages go beyond the boundaries of the “Jamaican experience” and connect to the creative act itself, in both the utilization of reuse and in the wide net cast by both fishermen and artists, even though the outcome is unsure. Like in Ward’s work, these villages are made up of what the fishermen can find-old oil barrels dotting the shore and brightly painted, recycled plywood shacks. Ward became particularly interested in Jamaican fishing villages as temporary spaces suggestive of both community and sustenance. Ward spent his childhood in Jamaica but has lived in the United States since he was a teenager therefore Jamaica, as a place, exists for him as a blend between reality and an imagined zone. The centerpiece was a monumental work entitled Nu Colossus.
Ward’s installation functioned as a hybrid zone where the real and the imaginary are intermingled-a place where one could not quite disentangle the mirage from reality.
The title, Sub Mirage Lignum, represents the three main themes of the exhibition: sub, in the dual sense of “underneath” and “substitute for another (space)” mirage, a false image produced by the refraction of light, subject to human interpretation and lignum, derived from Lignum Vitae (“wood of life”), a tree whose bloom is the national flower of Jamaica.
#FATE X MIRAGE SERIES#
At MASS MoCA, Ward created a new installation encompassing the entire second floor of Building 4, which visitors could experience as both a large-scale environment and as a series of smaller yet connected spaces.
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