Exhibitions
KEVIN FORD: IDS OF MARCH
Tops Gallery / 400 S. Front St.. March 15 - May 18th
Kevin Ford
Tops Gallery is pleased to present Ids of March, an exhibition of paintings by Kevin Ford. This is Ford’s fourth show with the gallery, and it spans both of Tops’ exhibition spaces. In the Front Street gallery, the show is comprised of two monumental paintings and a salon-style arrangement of smaller works that extends from floor to ceiling, while in the Madison Avenue Park vitrine-like space, two monumental two-panel paintings of butts hang side by side.
Ids of March extends Ford’s ongoing exploration of perception, highlighting the tangible distinction between reality and observation. The boundaries between passing glance, conscious observation, and the residue of memory become blurred as objects and experiences coalesce and break apart within each painting. There is some distance between the paint and the object, making the viewer aware of how much of one's belief about something changes the way it is experienced.
In 2024 we find ourselves at a moment of extreme uncertainty. This ambiguity gives rise to a need for certainty and provides an opening for those who can prescribe quick and tangible answers, no matter how wrong they might be. In what we are now accepting as reality, what is being depicted seems secondary to how it is being depicted. We are constantly served chaos, but that chaos is rendered vividly and in HD. Leaning into the ambiguity of the moment, these paintings embrace the uncertain and serve as catalog entries on the nature of perception in our last gasp of the physical age. In Ford’s paintings there is a feeling that the idea is emerging at the same time as its form. The constellation of paintings constructs a loose visual narrative that goes beyond replication, allowing for the intuitive connections and conjurings we have all now grown accustomed to make as we each go about our day navigating the physical world while simultaneously inhabiting some kind of digital other world. The overwhelming scale of the exhibition serves as a testament to Ford's assertion of the physical.
Kevin Ford is a painter living and working in Connecticut. He has had solo exhibitions at Hesse Flatow, New York, NY, Gallery 12.26, Dallas, TX, Galerie Semiose, Paris, FR, Kate Werble Gallery, New York, NY, and at Tops Gallery, Memphis, TN. Ford’s work has been exhibited in group and two-person exhibitions at Turley Gallery, NY, Primary Projects, FL , The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, ME, Kipnz, NY, Reyes Finn, MI, Casey Kaplan Gallery, NY, The Islip Art Museum, NY, IRL, NY, Marquee Projects, NY, Subtitled, NY, Tops Gallery, TN, and at Essex Flowers, NY, among others. Ford’s work has been featured in V Magazine, Serendipity Magazine, included in the book Artists II, and has been reviewed in ARTFORUM, The New York Times, Burnaway, Two Coats of Paint, and other publications. Ford received his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University and his BFA in Painting from Boston University.
