Raque Ford “Nighttime Grudge or How I Wanted to Be a Rockstar” at Greene Naftali, New York

You know when you are standing
And your sole is on the floor
And your heel is digging into the floor
And that tiny place concerning them
Appropriate there
That is exactly where I make a minor house for you

“Nighttime Grudge or How I Wished to Be a Rockstar” marks Raque Ford’s debut solo exhibition at Greene Naftali, showcasing a new system of function that infuses abstraction with narrative likely. By turns slick and diaristic, intimate and bracing, Ford’s newest wall is effective and sculptures extend the official choices of her signature material: fragments of language incised into stiff sheets of coloured acrylic.

That overall imbrication of form and content – what a person critic calls her “Plexiglass poetry” – spans her do the job across two and 3 dimensions. Panels of mirrored acrylic are etched with a spidery script and cite texts equally authored and observed, generating layered performs that discover how identification is solid as a result of the remnants of common society. An achieved printmaker, Ford has produced a suite of monotypes at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, broaching new official territory with experimental approaches that defy the medium&#8217s strictures. &#8220I was turned off by the tidiness and fastidiousness of prints,&#8221 Ford recalled of her art university training but these unique performs manifest the exact same playful eclecticism she delivers to all she does, combining common intaglio processes like drypoint with embossed hippie flowers and pools of amazed watercolor.

At the gallery&#8217s center are a group of platform dancefloors produced from tiled Plexi, its bright hues tightly fitted into colorful cladding for these uncomplicated picket structures. Ford&#8217s penchant for prefabricated and industrial products ties her work to the legacy of minimalism, and these sculptures channel each the very low-slung geometries of Robert Morris and the house-age Plexi boxes of Donald Judd. The extra direct referent, though, is Felix Gonzalez-Torres&#8217s Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) of 1991, a newborn blue plinth occupied for 5 sweaty minutes for each working day by a male dancer in silver lamé incredibly hot trousers. Subtler in her queering, Ford also embellishes her platforms to make place for thoughts and impulses at odds with Minimalism&#8217s arduous exclusions: flamboyance and feminine anger and disappointment, wish and a night time out at the club, with graffiti scratched into the lavatory mirror that displays us back again to ourselves.

At Greene Naftali, New York
until April 9, 2025

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