2009 JUAN FORD: SIMPLE INTERFERENCE

EXHIBITION IMAGES

Ford’s new painting series Simple Intervention depicts eucalyptus and gum tree branches to gesture toward the problematic binary of environment/society and their uncomfortable interconnection. In Ford’s paintings, Australian flora and packaging tape are entangled in an awkward relationship, as if to make plain the fragility and inelegance of their bonds.

The social context of Ford’s paintings of Australian flora is inescapable and provokes references to canonised national imagery. In effect, Ford encourages us to consider what it means to re-image classic references to the Australian landscape within the context of contemporary art and society. Further, how are we to perceive Ford’s paintings, and their contemporary concerns with the environment, in relation to Australia’s art history and landscape tradition, as inscribed by Hans Heysen, Arthur Streeton, Margaret Preston and so on?

Veronica Tello, February 2009

Melbourne-based artist Juan Ford graduated from RMIT with a Master of Fine Arts (Fine Art) in 2001 after gaining first class honours for his Bachelor of Fine Art (Painting) in 1998. Since graduating, Ford has exhibited extensively throughout Australia in solo and group shows, including the national touring survey exhibition Glacier: Contemporary Painting (2001–03). In 2004 he won the Fletcher Jones Art Award, and the People’s Choice prizes in both the ABN Amro Emerging Artists Prize and the Salon des Refuses. He was also awarded an Australia Council studio residency in Rome in the same year. In 2006 Ford won the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, Campbelltown Regional Art Gallery. He was a finalist in the 2007 National Artists’ Self-Portrait Prize at the University of Queensland.

In 2008/09 Ford’s work was exhibited in several major public institutional group exhibitions: Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art’s Contemporary Australia: Optimism; the University of Queensland Art Museum’s Neo Goth: Back in Black; The Space in Between at Bendigo Art Gallery; and in Victoria’s Hamilton Art Gallery exhibition Eye to ‘i’ – The Self in Recent Art. Last year Ford also completed two major portrait commissions – a portrait of Richard Larkin for Monash University Museum of Art, and of Deputy Vice Chancellor Prof Andrew Coats for Sydney University.

Ford’s rich, elegant, hyperrealist portraits, and his hauntingly minimalist landscape paintings prompt us to contemplate humankind’s fragile inter-connectedness with our environment.