Juan Ford

(born 1973)

Tentative Steps, 2008-09

Footnotes

PROVENANCE
Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney
Private collection, Melbourne

EXHIBITED
Simple Interference, Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney, 3 - 22 March 2009


The Landscape becomes us, and we it. But hasn't it always been so? To consider ourselves somehow removed from the dirt we walk on is the result of our collective imagination at play, so it seems a personal revelation when it is made plain that it isn't so. Perhaps this is what I am trying to paint.
Juan Ford, 2008

'Fords new painting series Simple Interference depicts eucalyptus and gum tree branches to gesture towards 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?'1

1. Veronica Tello, Arts Writer, February 2009, exh. cat., Simple Interference, Sullivan + Strumpf, Sydney, 2009