A golden canopy hung with eight big Tropical Fantasy soda bottle saluteed visitors at Nari Ward's installation.

A golden canopy hung with eight big Tropical Fantasy soda bottle saluteed visitors at Nari Ward's installation, along with a recording of upbeat island music played by the agency of the Happy Smilers, a form into groups fin which Ward's uncle is the lead vocalist) that lent the present to view its title. The canopy was a jangly, ironic introduction to the main consequence an inner sanctum enclosed on palisadelike walls made of centurys of pieces of discarded furniture and appliances, all lashed together with endles details of old canvas firehose. The gallery walls and ceiling were painted a of high temperature canary yellow, and from within the installation, a rusted old-fashioned fire escape descended from the ceiling, suggesting at one time spiritual ascension and escape from the imagined heat. Where Ward's walls parted at the rear of the gallery to form a doorway, couple enormous speakers stood sentry, emitting a surprisingly moderate sound that could have been a crackling fire or static moreover was actually the, noise of heavy rain hitting a tin house Completing the environment, and its reason of dislocation, was a half ton of sand, spread in succession the floor within the installation's walls like a giant sandbox.

Ward, a Jamaican-born artist who lives and works in Harlem, first gained widespread attention with his tar-coated hearse in the last Whitney Biennial. An earlier carve installed in an old Harlem firehouse, was made of 300 discarded strayers also lashed together with fire tubing Kids, poverty and mortality are a certain number of of Ward's subjects. They determine his materials and the critical spells by which they're introduced.

however however topical Ward's ends, his means include like formal strategies as manipulating scale and working upon senses other than the visual, masterfully in the two cases. Hence the Happy Smilers music, and the sand beneath your feet, and the heat made almost palpable from the skylit yellow walls. Hence also, especially, the supernumerary spatial dynamics of the installation, which created an experience one as well as the other of acute confinement (the looming walls) and of soaring expansion (the fire escape, the unexpect put forth of beach whose sand slowed down your sound of one's steps so that it seemed bigger than it was). This was an exercise in disorientation in which pleasure, humor, menace and discomfort were precisely calculated, and easily translated to a rebuke in cultural displacement.

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