Ya La’Ford interprets the West in James Museum show

During her 2022 residency at the Ogden Museum of Contemporary Art in Utah, Tampa artist Ya La’Ford got out and explored the unique geological terrain of the region, its mountains, canyons and landscapes so unlike anything she’d seen, in Florida or elsewhere.

Ford’s abstract expressionist sculptures, paintings and mixed media works liberally use geometric shapes, linear tracks and labyrinth designs as a way of interpreting her impressions and her interpretations. And the western atmosphere spoke to her.

The results of La’Ford’s sojourn is on view at the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art in St. Petersburg. Survey the West: A Cross-Continental Reflection opens Saturday.

It’s the first foray into abstract art for the museum, which is dedicated to artistic depictions of the American West, from the historical to the interpretive.

For Ford, it’s her largest solo exhibition yet.

She was exploring the region, she says, when she ran into a surveyor. She explained that she was an artist – and he gave her an extra surveying tripod he happened to have with him. “Take it,” he said. “See how you can use it.”

“And from that point,” the artist explains, “it was an easy perspective. Everyone can look into one lens – it’s what do you see? What do you make of it? And that’s what this show is really all about.”

Inside a gyser, immersive video installation. Photo by Bill DeYoung.

Survey the West also includes a video installation, and an immersive (360 degree) video room where visitors are taken inside an erupting geyser.

“When you think of the American West, everyone identifies with ‘OK, the American West, this is who we are, this is part of the trajectory of history,’” La’Ford says. “People don’t think about American abstraction as the art of America. Imagine a girl from New York coming to the West, and then bringing that information to the South. It’s the collision of so many different volumes.”

She spent time with the Navajo Nation, at Four Corners National Monument,Yellowstone National Park and Monument Valley and visited “Spiral Jetty,” Robert Smithson’s land art sculpture at Great Salt Lake.

Photo by Bill DeYoung.

“And I think that the pigmentation shows, in trying to capture the way that things smelled, the movement, the energy, the symbolism – I think that it was magical. Usually I’m looking for these linear and cyclical geometric labyrinths, but for the first time I’m incorporating these mountainous imageries and Western symbiology. And that was fun.”

The James Museum exhibit, running through May 18, will also invite the public to contribute to one of La’Ford’s trademark community murals, this one designed like ancient rock carvings known as petroglyphs.

And museum docents will conduct tours starting with the permanent collection and ending at the La’Ford exhibit, tracing the diverse arc of artistic interpretation over the years.

“I am really kind of pushing form to its highest emotional extent,” the artist explains. “And I’m hoping that amongst the turmoil you can find the beauty. I’m hoping it’s a thought-provoking experience for not just people who have visited this space, but people who haven’t visited. And that it starts to entangle us, and weave us all together.”

For more information, visit the James Museum website.