Heil, Drain The Swamp Sculpture

Ward Yoshimoto was born in 1960 in Los Angeles, California. Growing up in the industrial suburbs of Los Angeles, Yoshimoto felt the polarizing forces of his Japanese American heritage and the growing plasticity of the Suburban American dream. Drawing on the turbulent social and political landscape of his youth, his encyclopedic knowledge of art history and pop culture, varied experiences ranging from traditional Japanese brush-painting to film making, and commercial photography. He has lived and worked in New York for over the past thirty years as a commercial photographer and fine artist. He attended CSU Dominguez Hills as a design and studio major, and then in 1984 received his BFA in photography from The Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, California. He moved to NYC in 1985 to start a photography studio in the photo district. In 1999 he received his MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College. He has shown both nationally and internationally along with being the director and founding member of the international art group ICOBA. Ward, in his investigation of sculpture, has tried to also bring in issues that are often applied to painting, photography, and the digital world. In making his work he is very aware of the materials and objects he uses to tell his story, while also being faithful to the process and processes of creating a unique piece of work. His assemblages of common objects are able to create new ways of seeing and thinking, while often self referential they play to common themes and look for our relationship to the human experience. His new works, by using hardware cloth as a structural material, have an instant grid format and a mathematical relationship to space. In this way he is able to have a dialog within his work referencing architecture, minimalism, photography, virtual space, and digital media. Yoshimoto commingles American and Japanese traditions and craftsmanship in his deft assemblages of found objects. Referencing Dada, Surrealism, and Pop, as well as the turbulent social and political landscape of his youth, Yoshimoto’s wry constructions address an ongoing history of cultural displacement with equal parts iconoclastic brio and meditative, almost obsessive rigor. He has lived in Brooklyn since 1992 and his sculpture studio is in Red Hook Brooklyn. His previous studios have been at the Calder Center in TriBeCa and in LIC at the Crane Street Studios/5Pointz building.