Reception Wednesday, April 7, 7-10 PM
Hours: Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday 12-6 PM
April 7 ? May 8, 2004

SATELLITE is extremely pleased to present Dark Victory, an exhibition of oil paintings and watercolors by Dan Ford.

Dan Ford?s richly painted canvases and watercolors pay homage to 18th and 19th century English Romantic and genre paintings, while updating the subject matter rendered in these signature styles so that the work lands squarely in the middle of our contemporary consciousness. In this exhibition Ford creates a series of landscapes and interiors that exude the atmospheric and light-drenched qualities found in the works of J. M. W. Turner. Though each work may reference an actual Turner painting, the imagery has been replaced with scenes from recent breaking news, such as sinking supertankers or the bombed-out palaces of the fallen Iraqi regime.

Ford mines the rich fields of art history, as well as the social and political histories behind such movements. Ford?s conflation of Romantic genre painting and contemporary imagery creates a conceptually based time continuum that examines and compares the projection of power by the British Empire during the Industrial Revolution with the current straying towards empire on the part of the United States. In such works as The Forty Virgins Spiriting away the Evidence of WMD Before the Arrival of the Crusaders, Ford beautifully renders an absurd, fantastical scene in which virginal apparitions writhe towards the heavens, carrying away the weapons evidence from dusty, sun baked ?mobile germ labs.? The explosive composition and subject call to mind Benjamin West, and wittily take note of the current clash between fundamentalist ideologies.

Dark Victory transforms the Satellite gallery into a space reminiscent of a period drawing room, where one can contemplate the political underpinnings behind Ford?s darkly romantic and humorous paintings.

Dan Ford has exhibited in, among other venues, The Drawing Center (New York), Hudson River Museum (Yonkers), Dumbo Art Center (Brooklyn), White Columns (New York), Hood Museum of Art (Hanover, NH) and Art in General (New York). His work will appear this spring at The Rotunda Gallery (Brooklyn), and The Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, VT) among others.