de boer is delighted to present ‘Keep Forever’ Kash Ford’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition consists of new sculptures and wall works that pair inspiration from both the assemblage movement of the 50s and 60s and the culture of the 90s in America, specifically the onset of modern technology. Traffic cones, wire cables, and cords coalesce with action figures and toy trucks in works that probe masculinity, power, and cultural transition.

Ford has embraced an all-inclusive approach to process and material – paint as found object, found object as paint, painting as sculpture, sculpture as painting. Cables and cords from the days when your computer actually plugged into the internet to connect are dangling, tangled and buried in paint. Traffic cones, yard flags and other construction materials are playfully contrived with toy trucks, action figures, and bottles of testosterone.

Through a process of destroying and repairing, collecting and defacing, the objects and forms incorporated in Ford’s paintings imbue each work with identity, a sprinkle of technological anxiety, fractured notions of masculinity, and a skepticism of systems of power. He utilizes his materials to deconstruct traditional and figure based painting turning to discarded objects, and things that have been abandoned, deemed invaluable or useless as his materials to favor process over image and to reject the brush but not painting itself.