An aberrant history of sports hydration

Anyone who has attended an event at a major sporting stadium in recent years will have encountered an art-historical curiosity: a planar anamorphic projection. These are the distorted corporate logos that are painted onto the playing surface. Stretched along carefully defined mathematical vectors, the warped shapes become 'flat' and legible logos when viewed from the correct angle. Today, the correct viewing angle for sports stadium anamorphosis is from the couch. The illegible image on the stadium turf becomes a readable brand when it is adjusted by the television camera and relayed to our homes. In today's televisual anamorphic projections, Juan Ford finds an apt metaphor for contemporary sporting spectacles: the actual, physical events of the arena take second place to the virtual reality of the commercial broadcast. In works like An aberrant history of sports hydration (2010), Ford returns to the more familiar form of anamorphic projection in art: mirror anamorphosis. Ford's work is a reflection on a conundrum at the heart of representations of sport. For thousands of years, artists have struggled to reconcile the dynamism of sport with the stasis of art. The other great virtual reality mechanism is memory. A memoir from the break of day (2010), a self-portrait of the artist as an eight-year-old cross-country runner, plots this rhythm of intensity and distance in sporting memories.