Ivan Forde
Bio: Ivan Forde (b. 1990) works across printmaking, digital animation, sound performance, and installation. Using a wide variety of photo-based and print-making processes (and more recently music and performance), Ivan Forde retells stories from epic poetry casting himself as every character. His non-linear versions of these time-worn tales open the possibility of new archetypes and alternative endings. By crafting his own unique mythology and inserting himself in historical narratives, he connects the personal to the universal and offers a transformative view of prevailing narratives in the broader culture.
Ivan’s latest series, Illumination (2016-2018), based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, explores multiplicity and diversity using the body, specifically black bodies, as both material and subject. Through various iterations — cyanotypes, silkscreens, and etchings — and at times veering into abstraction, he recreates the iconic hero’s journey with a modern sociopolitical subtext. For Fight (2015-2016), he depicts a similar hero/villain archetype in yet an another epic struggle this time borrowing the conventions of fantasy-horror video games like Mortal Kombat. Again utilizing various media — digital collage and animations — player one battles competing interpretations of his identity in ritualistic encounters, and in doing so, touches on questions about the wider perception of black bodies in virtual space. Other short-run, spin-off series like the Pearl King (2015-2016) about a jewel-obsessed demigod and his spaceship and Axis Mundi (2014) that imagines the initiation rites of young men into fictional societies, elaborate on certain recurring personae and tangential subplots. Earlier bodies of work like De I Section (2013-2014), whose title is a play on the word “dissection,” and Transformation (2012) about the the 17th century allegory, Paradise Lost, edge closer to surrealist self-portraits showing the artist in various states of metamorphosis.
Ivan has been included in recent group exhibitions and performances at The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Whitney Museum of Art. He is also the recipient of numerous awards including the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, as well as residencies at the Lower East Side Printshop and Dustin Yellin’s Pioneer Works. He received his MFA from Columbia University and has a BA in Literature from SUNY Purchase College.
Artist Statement:
“What Does it mean to fu*k with history? To Run through centuries for centuries in search of the self, the living, the dead, and their movements. Gradually we become History. Bullets into tomorrow.”
– from Amiri Baraka’s Wise, Whys, Y’s
My practice encompasses research, performance, and printmaking at the intersection of blackness and epic poetry. I work with cyanotype to make blue-prints by laying on light-sensitive paper/fabric outside under the sun. I use my body as the matrix for image making, as a measure for all figures in my pictures. I’ve produced digital collage, sound and video animation illuminating poems such as Paradise Lost and The Epic of Gilgamesh to deeply engage stories that contemplate sources of human origin and culture. This project aims to visualize the Invocation to a story of communal resistance, retelling the origins of the village my grandmother is from named “Buxton.”
To tell it, We must
tell it with
fire
and light.
Buxton-Friendship was founded in 1840 – the same year “photography” was coined by Sir John Herschel, inventor of Cyanotype – by 128 freed Africans. After emancipation they collectively bought an abandoned cotton plantation by circumventing a British crown law that stated no individual could buy less than 100 acres of land at 6 pounds sterling per acre. This decree meant that a formerly enslaved person had little chance of owning property in their lifetime. However, to the surprise of the British governors the former slaves pooled their savings earned during overtime labor into wheelbarrows, and purchased 800 acres of land in cooperative ownership. Buxtonian writer and historian Ovid Abrams states, “They strategically performed a silent and non-violent revolution,” which was a part of the larger Village Movement (1838-48) in Guyana with successive villages founded through collective land purchases by formerly enslaved Africans.
L to R: He Who Saw The Deep (46 x 61”, Cyanotype body print on paper, 2017); Morning Raid (41 x 41”, Cyanotype on paper, 2017); Untitled (temporary sculpture), (17 x 22”, Inkjet print, 2017)