Reese Ford "I'll Know (Heft)"
Reese Ford "I'll Know (Heft)" 2026
Painting, Oil on wood panel
Dimensions: 14 x 14 inches
Unique
Signed on Verso
Reese Ford is an oil painter from Palo Alto, California, and a recent graduate of the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design. Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum of Los Gatos, Stamps Gallery, Gutman Gallery, and the University of Michigan’s Palmer Commons, where she presented her first solo exhibition, Modularity, among other venues throughout Southeastern Michigan.
Ford’s work is held in the private collection of Robinhood as well as by individual commissioners and collectors. She is the recipient of the Emil Weddige Award in Painting and Printmaking, the Emily Benatar Memorial Scholarship, and the California Governor’s Medallion. Her three-person group exhibition, Knit Narrative, ran at the Ypsilanti Riverside Arts Center in spring 2026. She is currently based in Palo Alto, California.
Artist Statement
"In my painting practice, I explore the complexity of time and memory recollection through compositional mechanisms of overlapping seemingly unrelated images into one frame. By offering an additional window-shaped space into an existing rectangular composition, viewers can feel the sensation of looking out, or looking in, on one’s personal memories.
Present in recent works across the array of moments they depict is the constant of the square. Its simple form takes shape in mimicry of medical patterns: arrhythmias, inserted cardioverter defibrillators, and ejection fraction ratios, all visual descriptions of my and my family's medical journeys. Circles are intermittently paired inside of its bounds to communicate the genetic markers of sex—a circle representing female, a square representing male—visible when tracing a family’s lineage. The medium of painting further solidifies the simultaneous inwardness of illness, invisibly existing within the genetic code, and our outward experienced humanness, by making these conflicting moments in time and space static." - Reese Ford