ON VIEW
April 18 – 16, 2025
May 8 – 17, 2025

OPENING RECEPTIONS
Friday, April 18, 5 – 7 pm
Thursday, May 8, 5 – 7 pm

Mark Ford

www.markfordart.com
@mark_ford_art

Mark Ford is a mixed media artist and educator living in Portland, Maine. He began making artist's books in 2003, bringing to the medium a background in both photography and graphic design. His current work focuses on the deconstruction of books, which he uses to make new objects that question systems of knowledge and invite the viewer to contemplate reading conventions. He has attended residencies at Hewnoaks Artist Colony, Vermont Studio Center, and Monson Arts. Recent shows include Want/Need at Zero Station Gallery in Portland, Maine, Connecting Distances at Rountree Gallery in Platteville, Wisconsin, as well as a solo show at Kate Cheney Chappell 83 Center for Book Arts, University of Southern Maine. He earned his MFA from Maine College of Art & Design in 2025, and has also completed an MA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College and a BA in English from the University of Utah.


Elective Affinities and Horizontal Exchanges questions the modern Western conception of an inner self and outer world by attempting to project the inner into the public sphere and to move thinking and the mind to the outside. Here, subjectivity is constructed on the wall and in the object. It is also an attempt, following Deleuze and Guattari, to explore the book form in its rhizomatic multiplicity, where the associations between texts illustrate the processes of deterritorialization (where books and text fragments are taken out of context) and reterritorialization (where they enter into new associations and meanings in relationship to other titles and fragments). My goal is to create formal and linguistic relationships that encourage the viewer to linger with the work, where any part of the work can be connected to any other. My intention is to remake my own identity through my connections to the discarded object. It is to recognize the provisional and rhizomatic quality of my own subjectivity, to acknowledge the inherent being and value in things, and to enter into a relationship of reciprocity with the material world.



The MFA Thesis Exhibitions for the Class of 2025 incorporate a range of making practices unified by the overwhelming concerns these students have for their environment, their communities, their families, and their own wellbeing. With an emphasis on the personal, and at times the anecdotal, these 17 artists make a variety of contributions in the form of ceramics, drawings, paintings, photographs, poems, prints, sculptures, sound and video installations, and textiles. The nature of their work and research demonstrates the caliber and cultural relevance of Maine College of Art & Design’s Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art program.