JD Reforma

JD Reforma’s practice incorporates painting, video, performance, sculpture and installation. Reforma employs a collage logic, appropriating language, aesthetics and subjects from popular, consumer and materialist cultures to interrogate notions of class, race and power. Often playful in appearance and satirical in tone, the works challenge audiences to contemplate the influence of contemporary visual culture on their personal and political relations.

Fibre optics: an intranet of virtue comprises 80 paintings on hand-felted ‘canvases’ made from coconut husk. On each, Reforma has stencilled aphorisms found in everyday sources such as social media, popular culture and conversations. Coconuts attract the artist for their ‘itinerant materiality’ – floating on ocean currents to establish new territories, they are both coloniser and diaspora. The texts on these ‘canvases’ consider issues of power, class and race while the surfaces themselves reframe the dominance of European materialities in contemporary painting.