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| James R Ford | |
1980 - Born in Frimley |
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| About the Artist | |
Ford's practice is idea driven and his resulting works take many forms. In 2002, with collaborator Spencer Harrison, he created a faux fitness regime called House Gymnastics. The project started as a website, developed a cult following, and became an internationally published book. In 2006 Ford co-curated the Kitson Kaleidoscope event with Mark McGowan: a two hour set of performances beamed live on the internet from Ford's bedroom in London. Participating artists included Sally O'Reilly, Russell Herron, Sarah Doyle and Brian Catling. |
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| Click to enlarge images (if larger image has been loaded) |
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The Bond Formula
2005 |
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| The installation depicts the recently vacated den of an obsessed James Bond fan who was working late into the night, singing along with Shirley Bassey's Goldfinger and studying his old maths text books. Trying to calculate the Bond Formula: that special mix of recurring characters, action sequences and predictable occurrences that make a Bond film. The walls are adorned with a series of diagrams, equations and graphs representing the spread and average times of the "necessary" scenes that appear in each movie, making it possible to predict the approximate times of key events in future films. |
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House Gymnastics
2002-present |
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| This faux fitness regime is akin to an internet based, Fluxus "happening", which often encouraged maximum audience participation. The viewer connects with House Gymnastics because it reminds them of their childhood, when they used to climb around the house and explore, with the desire to be one of their wall-climbing heroes like Batman or Spiderman. House Gym empowers the banal domestic setting with new meaning and excitement. |
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General Carbuncle
2006 |
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| Transforming a second-hand Ford Capri into the General Lee, from the Dukes of Hazzard, by covering it in little toy cars. Over four thousand toy cars were needed and so, in addition to searching out and purchasing appropriate toy cars himself, an appeal was started for people all over the world to send the artist their disused toy cars. The donator could write a little message on the toy car, or mark it in some other way, so they actually became part of the art whilst contributing to the sculpture. |
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Duchamp Played Chess; I Made Cranes
2007-2008 |
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| Marcel Duchamp claimed to have abandoned art for playing chess, but then secretly worked on his last major piece, Étant donnés, for 20 years. In 2007 Ford became disillusioned with his art practice and decided to dedicate all his time to making Origami Cranes instead of creating any new work. He slowly became obsessed by the paper folding process and, at the same time as making cranes, began to produce studies of them. Unbeknownst to himself, Ford was developing a new body of work.
During this period Ford folded 1,000 cranes, using a variety of coloured and patterned papers, which were later displayed as a large installation. |
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Hit Me With Your Best Shot
2008 |
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| This durational film features no tuneful audio - only the pathetic clicks and twangs produced by the plastic guitar controller can be heard as Ford plays his way through all 39 solo career songs in the Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock game.
In the sixteen week run up to Christmas 2008, Ford launched a participatory project in direct relation to this video work. Entitled HMWYBS Mystery Tracks, video clips of individual 'songs' were published on YouTube weekly and viewers were invited to guess which track was being played. |
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Hypnobopit
2009 |
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| The recorded audio emanating from the structure documents Ford completing the Bop It game's solo challenge in a monotonous 5 and a half minute session. The physical object was constructed in-between bouts of practicing the game, so the audio and visual progressed simultaneously. |
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33 things to do before you're 10
2007-2009 |
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| Over a 4-week residency period at FERREIRA PROJECTS, Ford created a room-sized installation filled with photography, handmade objects, looped video footage and leftover debris; a haphazard collection of documentation from the deceptively gruelling 33 things to do before you're 10 project.
Some of the 33 things, if lost or damaged previously, were remade for this incarnation of the project, including the home baked cakes which were cut into pieces and handed out at the opening of the exhibition. Parts of the installation such as the potted cress, sandcastle and cake remnants are ephemeral and decay/disintegrate over the duration of the show. |
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SIGNS POINT TO YES (Kylie Minogue)
2009 |
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| In this series Ford takes a selection of second-hand records, either produced in the 80s or containing songs that played profusely in the 80s, and judges them with a Magic 8-Ball: a toy used for fortune-telling or seeking advice. Using probability theory it can be shown that it takes an average of asking 72 questions of the Magic 8-Ball for all twenty of its answers to appear at least once. The pieces will keep being produced until all answers have been revealed. |
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| Education and biography | |
| EDUCATION 2004 - 2005 PG Dip Fine Art, Goldsmiths College, London, UK 1999 - 2002 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK 1998 - 1999 Foundation Art & Design, Winchester School of Art, Winchester, UK SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2009 Too Orangey For Crows, Enjoy Gallery, Wellington, NZ Only Boring People Get Bored, FERREIRA PROJECTS, London, UK 2008 Duchamp Played Chess; I Made Cranes, FERREIRA PROJECTS, London, UK 2004 Backseat Tuna Town, Taxi Gallery, Cambridge, UK 2003 Crème Brulee: The art of House Gymnastics, Northern Lights Gallery, Bristol, UK; Brahm Gallery, Leeds, UK SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2009 Group, Antoinette Godkin Gallery, Auckland, NZ Encounters with Scale, Portman Gallery, London, UK Sale, The Royal Standard, Liverpool, UK 2008 Irregular Pulse, FERREIRA PROJECTS, London, UK PURE_drawing+illustration, FERREIRA PROJECTS, London, UK 2007 Designersblock @ 100% Design Tokyo, Jingu Gaien, Tokyo, Japan Stick*Stamp*Fly, Gasworks, London, UK 4C: SightSeeing Tour, GUM Factory, Saatchi & Saatchi, London, UK Driven, Fieldgate Gallery, London, UK Extreme Crafts, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania Feel Good Feel Bad Boys and Girls, Lange Gasse 28, Ausberg, Germany 2006 GIFT, Museum MAN, Liverpool, UK Your Gallery@The Guardian, The Guardian Newsroom Gallery, London, UK Objects in Waiting, End Gallery, Sheffield, UK Knock Down Ginger, MyHouse Gallery, Nottingham, UK Kitson Kaleidoscope, Kitson Road, London, UK Terrible Toy Fair III, CBGB Art Gallery, New York, USA Another Product - Britishness, Cornerhouse, Manchester, UK 2005 Never Finished, Always Ready, 75 Brushfield Street, London, UK Bound_less, The Stenersen Museum, Oslo, Norway 2004 Pictoplasma Conference, Cafe Moskau, Berlin, Germany Exhibit.001 (Nth-Art), Ols $ Co Gallery, London, UK 2003 Re-Form, The Art Exchange Gallery, Nottingham, UK Trailing Cables, PEA Gallery & 291 Gallery, London, UK Disposable Generation, Bridlesmith Gate Gallery, Nottingham, UK Made@Home, Aspex Gallery, Portsmouth, UK 2002 Blueprint, Surface Gallery, Nottingham, UK 2001 Starbucks, Sex and Space Invaders, Surface Gallery, Nottingham, UK Curried Trout, The Art Exchange Gallery, Nottingham, UK ARTIST CATALOGUES AND PUBLICATIONS 2008 Duchamp Played Chess; I Made Cranes, FERREIRA PROJECTS, UK 2004 House Gymnastics, Random House/Ebury Press, UK OTHER PUBLICATIONS 2007 4C: SightSeeing Tour, GUM Factory, UK Ripley's Believe It or Not! 2008, Random House Books, UK Gross and disgusting things about the human body, Blue Bike Books, Canada 2006 GROK: An Introduction to New Media Art, Interactive CD-ROM, Rhizome.org 2005 The 505 weirdest online stores, Sourcebooks, North America BIBLIOGRAPHY 2009 Culture Check, The Dominion Post (NZ), 26 August Hunter, A., REVIEW: Only Boring People Get Bored, Art Journal Online, 4 March Essential things to see and do this month, Grafik, Issue no.171, March Recommended exhibitions this month, Art World, UK/Int'l Edition - Issue 9, Feb / Mar News in Pictures, Design Week, 22 January 2008 London for Free: James R Ford, Metro (London), 24 April Essential things to see and do this month, Grafik, Issue no.161, April 2007 Pick of the Month - 4C: SightSeeing Tour, Creative Review, August 2006 Maynard, G., I stuck 4,342 toy cars on my old motor, Daily Express, 27 November Phillips, A., From Ford Capri to General Lee, Southwark News, 7 September Denes, M., Curate your own exhibition, The Guardian (G2), 6 September Wilson, J., The art of smoking, LeftLion Magazine, Issue no.10, Spring Eisele, K., Mex sport: House Gymnastics, Mex magazine (Switzerland), April 2005 Pepper, T., Making their own breaks, Newsweek International, 26 Sep - 3 Oct Marchen, J., Hjemmefitness, Berlingske Tidende newspaper (Denmark), 9 April 2004 Hughes, G., Bogey Ball, Bizarre Magazine, Issue no.89, August Perbos, L., Blanco, S., Latherrade, F., Do it Yourself, Buy-Sellf, Issue no.4 (France), May Hearn, K., Chocolate starfish goes online, BBC-i Beds, Herts and Bucks (www.bbc.co.uk), published online 18 March Poulson, A., But is it art?: General Carbuncle, Dazed&Confused, March 2003 Adams, T., Tips for a happy new you, The Observer, 28 December Shields, A., Frothy table reading, Time Out London, 10-17 December Eyre, H., How extreme is your house?, The Independent on Sunday, 07 December The Most Remarkable things in Culture this Month, Esquire Magazine, December The World in Pictures, Hello! Magazine, Issue no.784, 30 September Moore, C., The Spectator's Notes, The Spectator, 13 September Wood, L., How to muscle in at home, Metro Newspaper, 19 August Zweifel, P., Don't try this at home: Jackass in the Living room, 20 Minuten Newspaper, Basel, Switzerland, 7 May Kwok, D., Inside the World of House Gymnastics, Tablet Newspaper, Seattle, USA, Issue no.66, April Jenkins, W., Driving me up the wall, Dazed&Confused, February RESIDENCIES 2009 Artist in Residence, 33 things to do before you're 10, FERREIRA PROJECTS, London, UK 2008 Artist in Residence, Duchamp Played Chess; I Made Cranes, FERREIRA PROJECTS, London, UK 2004 PVA LabCulture, ArtSway, New Forest, Hampshire, UK |
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| Website: www.jamesrford.com | |
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