Kianga Ford
Ridgewood, NY
Kianga Ford’s sound and visual installations have been exhibited at venues that include the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Art in General; the Contemporary, Baltimore; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; and at the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art. Ford has been an artist-in-residence at USF Verftet in Bergen, Norway; the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada; and Atelier d’Alexandrie in Alexandria, Egypt. She is an assistant professor in the Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art, and she received her MFA in 2003 from UCLA, where she studied with Mary Kelly in the Interdisciplinary Studio program. She is the recipient of an Irvine Fellowship and an Okern Fellowship.
Walking Home
Kianga Ford
Artist BioWalking Home combines a cross-country walk, a multimedia installation and a published book. Drawing on endurance performance, ethnography and new media, Kianga Ford’s project uses the simple gesture of walking to reflect upon the impact of distance on daily life and work, and on the changing concept of home. Ford begins by walking from her home in Los Angeles to her childhood home in Central Florida over the course of three months. Her journey is recorded in its entirety on video with the footage used as the raw material for the multimedia installation/lounge environment, The America Lounge. Using the archive of imagery collected on this cross-country walk, DJs and VJs are able to ”spin” America, interweaving musical traditions with images of contemporary America, thereby creating a new social environment. The book chronicles Ford’s project, allowing the work to last beyond the life of the installation.