Nathan Ward

Nathan Ward is an artist and educator living in Morgantown, West Virginia. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from West Virginia University in 2014. After graduating, he moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and worked as a freelance artist for several years. During that time, he gained experience with book arts, gallery productions, museum archives, and a wide range of photographic commissions. Ward was awarded a Graduate Teaching Fellowship by the University of Oregon in 2018 and received a Master of Fine Arts degree in 2021. After completing his master’s degree, he returned to West Virginia, where he now teaches in the School of Art & Design at West Virginia University.

Photography is both a medium and subject in Ward's work. At the center of his practice is a fascination with the indeterminate nature of photographs and their complicated relationship to reality. Of particular interest is how the medium’s nearness—or capacity for nearness—to human visual perception has shaped its conventions and the interpretation of its pictures. Over the past several years, Ward has created several black-and-white landscape series that explore the vague boundary between representational depiction and abstraction by leveraging the notion of photographic veracity. Through artist books and installations, he deconstructs and reinterprets the aesthetic, contextual and factual properties of photographs to present psychologically charged experiences that manifest the medium’s epistemological aspect.