Ivan Forde

Interview with Ivan Forde

Questions by Andreana Donahue

Hi Ivan. You were born in Georgetown, Guyana, then relocated to Harlem at the age of ten. How has the experience of living in these distinct places contributed to your perspective as an artist? 
My early childhood I grew up in a village sitting on top of white sandy hills and lush vegetation named Timehri. It is 26 miles south of Georgetown on the Demerara river. “Timehri” is a Carib (Kalina Amerindian peoples) word for rock drawings located deep in the Guyana hinterland that pre-date the arrival of Europeans in the New World. Timehri translates in a general sense to the hand making art. So let us imagine a hand slowly drawing a dotted line...The village is the gateway into and out of Guyana, and so from earliest memory I watched and listened to roaring airplanes lifting off and landing at the international airport located nearby our home. I was aware of people going on or returning from a journey, and I knew that the journey had immense value. For me, it's not about the similarities between Harlem and Timehri. I consider the differences, the half between space that I and many others before me occupy. There is a long line of artists among most famously the great poet Wilson Harris, and abstract painters Aubry Williams and Frank Bowling who immigrated from Guyana to the UK in the 1940’s and 50’s with subsequent families relocating to the U.S. and Canada in the 1960’s till present that so far produced artists like Keisha Scarville, Christie Neptune, and Erika Defreitas. Its an ongoing movement you see, And I locate myself in this cultural triangle of those who had to leave, those who stayed, and those who return. Yet the space I occupy between Harlem, Timehri, and beyond, imagine it as the Atlantic Ocean perhaps, prompts a plunge into multi-consciousness relating fantasy, fabulation, sexuality, the history of the Universe, the Solar System, the Earth and organic life on it, landscapes, and language to my lived experiences. My movement from Timehri village to a broader cosmopolitan experience of Blackness in Harlem was alienating at first, but ultimately and still does offer nuance to the difference and diversity within black cultures globally. Right now I’m walking down 116th street and this is Harlem you know, Nigerian kids are running by me into a barbershop, I’m looking at the red green and yellow star flag of Cameroon, there's a restaurant called Kingston, the avenue is named Frederick Douglass BLVD so even on the street I'm on there’s a direct message to the multiculturalisms located within Black identity. So The Hand draws a dotted line that gives form to these relationships while locating myself in our broader cultural and mythic narratives, the journey’s that got us here, the modes of knowledge that keep us alive, and the cultural imagination that sustains our futures.  

Can you talk about your transition to art-making from a previous focus on Classic Literature?
It was never really  a transition. While studying poetry at Purchase, I was simultaneously practicing digital and darkroom photography. This culminated in self portraits of the imagined Reader of Paradise Lost. Writers such as Shakespeare, Blake, Whitman, Dante, and more essentially Milton, (of course the canonized writers the academy focuses on, I came to Gilgamesh later on my own) showed me how poetry and by extension language functions to enhance everyday life and plays an important role in the theory, production, and reception of visual art. Early on, for me photography was about documenting a factual moment, whereas I saw poetry as a reflection on deeper impressions using the real to produce the imaginary. Poetry became visual and photography became poetic. And I began to photographically insert myself into epic narrative moments where the tension and context is dense, dramatic, and important to the grander design and history of our world and the people in it. Now I explore the tension between the real and the imaginary, between Fact and Truth.

I want to insert my multiple affiliated identities in world historical contexts like Satan’s journey from Hell to Paradise, the Deluge, Hannibal crossing the Alps, my mother immigrating to the US, or the radical tactics my ancestors invented in the early afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery. I truly recognize myself and my body as a part of a big mysterious ongoing story of organisms connected by life on this planet. So I use poetic structures in my practice to mediate the range of experiences, the range of themes, the range of perspectives that one might navigate. My art practice enables me to migrate in a sense. I position my body within landscapes of the Odyssey, or Paradise Lost, or the Epic of Gilgamesh diving into deep time to understand for one that Modernism created a kind of division between the present and the “obsolete” past, between contemporary life and the ancestors, but I claim there is no such separation, we are those people, they are us, it's the same line of movement and we are all in it together. Our narrative is beautiful, tragic, complex, and yes it's ongoing so we take responsibility in order to move forward with intention.

Can you tell us about your current studio and typical daily routine? 
I do most of my reading outside of the studio. However, when I'm there, I'm typically drawing, or making prints or exposing cyanotypes or just sitting around while listening to a lecture or artist talk on youtube. I recently got a studio in East Harlem. I take breaks to go on walks around the neighborhood. On these walks I carry thin tissue paper and graphite to do rubbings of surfaces and textures on the street, gates, cars, buildings, anything that catches my eye really. It slows me down, and I get to talk and interact with people as I do this in public. Recently a Rasta man who sells west African masks around the corner invited me to do a rubbing of a piece. I did it right there on the sidewalk, some people stopped, crowded around, and his cousin standing over me sort of narrated my drawing movements around the textured cheeks and eyes to the old Rasta man who couldn’t see what I was doing on the ground. I stopped he saw the result. He asked me what I was going to do with it, and I said this is it! we already just did whatever there was to do. It showed me what the great American poet Jay Wright refers to: ‘Experience as Vision, the Event as Metaphor.”

What role does research or planning have in the generation of your work? And experimentation?
I get a great amount of joy from research. It  is embedded in everything I make. However the kind of research practice varies depending on the parameters of the project. Etymology is always first though, following the origin, meaning, and associations of words like a road map to get somewhere interesting. That I learned from Sun Ra. I try to avoid dead end words, and follow highway words that can go for miles elsewhere and reveal connections to other places, or histories. Some aspects of my research barrows from anthropological and narrative approaches developed by W.E.B. Dubois. I studied Dubois’ scholarship most notably the Philadelphia Negro, Souls of Black Folk, and Black Reconstruction among many others with Saidiya Hartman and Robert gooding-Williams while developing my ongoing project titled Invocation.  I address the archive of oral, written, historical, and imaginary accounts of the political history of Buxton, my grandmother’s village, in Guyana. The research begins with the village’s founding by a group of 128 former slaves led by radical black women in 1840, the same period cyanotypes were invented by Sir John William Herschel who coined the word ‘photography’ that very same year. Now according to the modes of knowledge the academy teaches there is no apparent connection between these events, but I consider Wilson Harris’s theory of vision as historical dimension where linear human time collapses into simultaneous presents and futures, which guides me intuitively to uncover the poetics of relation between the founding of Buxton by Black women at the dawn of Photography and Cyanotypes.  I wonder how they saw themselves and each other. What image where they intentionally making without a camera? For me—the village, the land— is the photograph. It’s faded somethings are blurred and buried but the surface is still there to be scanned to be touched.

How long have you been working with photo-based printing methods such as cyanotypes and body prints? Can you walk us through your overall process?
I’d say all my life. Everything I did from playing tennis to being into fashion prepared me for this. I’ve been working in printmaking for 5 years. I was drawn to cyanotype because it’s a photochemical method that lends itself to printmaking. It’s a bridge. I like to blend multiple methods in one print. My ongoing Illumination series of prints inspired by the relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu, mixes cyanotype and silkscreen, two processes I brought together that I’d  never seen unified before. Gilgamesh is Enkidu’s divine doppelgänger and i use each processes to make the distinction. Early on in the work, Gilgamesh is almost always printed in dot pattern silkscreen, to me representing order, society, and the perception of his tyrannic kingship. Enkidu bathes in blue cyanotype as he embodies the natural world, with his deep wisdom of the forest and what mysteries lie waiting there. I perform as both characters for the camera, generating a series of poses wearing print based fabrics I've made layered with my everyday clothing. I print these images as transparencies, then cut and collage them onto light sensitive surfaces to expose to sunlight. After a certain point I began to lay down on the larger prints as they were exposing generating body prints layered with lens based imagery. The work started talking back, and what it was showing me was that the emphasis was on difference and diversity between these look alikes. After 3 and a half years working in this way I began drawing with a heat pen on paper, and transferring these marks to copper plate etching studying with Sarah Sze, Kiki Smith, and Valerie Hammond Thomas. These exercises  really helped me see line. Line is so important! Its energy, life itself, (life line) the soul, all that you love and disdain, right there and people can feel it. Its older than language. Its a pure mode of communication and my drawings explore these concepts. I take what I learn and bring it back to the epic story. Its like Gilgamesh, learns to draw with fire, and Enkidu figures out how to use light to make body prints, they come together and share their skills with one another building a world so to speak. 

Can you talk about the influence of video game aesthetics—as well as the experience of watching your older brothers play Mortal Kombat—on your Fight! series? 
The culture wars of the 1990’s deemed video games and hip hop among other new cultural genres as having a negative influence on teenagers. In Timehri my brothers would host these video game tournaments at our house, and kids would pack our living room playing all the classic games one could imagine at that time. I was too young to play competitively but i was given a prime seat to watch. Watching is different from playing obviously and many years later I realized that what I was really seeing was, in the sense of Sub-Zero and Scorpion, the same stylized body and moves mirrored with a color shift. Beyond that the tonality of the colors in the background, the landscapes, the narrative, the sounds left a great impression on me. So in 2013, I began “Fight!” At the Vermont Studio center. I’d go on walks and hikes and make pictures in the rural landscape. Selfies if you well although at that time selfies was a new word. The concept for the series was to bring the hyper-graphics of video games aesthetics in dialogue with documentary nature photography. I played the role of both the hero and villain. by cutting and merging different body parts i generated monsters in photoshop to defeat. It culminated in a quite simple image called Fight Your Rival, that posses the idea that of course ones greatest foe is the self. Funny enough it was these concepts  that drew me back to the Epic of Gilgamesh, because it shares the same quality of difference and diversity through sameness.  

Your recent solo exhibition Dense Lightness with Baxter St at CCNY was heavily inspired by The Epic of Gilgamesh. Why are you drawn to this ancient narrative and how does this body of work reinterpret the Hero Archetype? 
Dense Lightness was organized by Anna Harsanyi and i’m ever grateful for her dedication and support over the 2 years we worked on putting this show together. It's the first solo showing of multiple works on paper and fabric from this ongoing series. I’m drawn to Gilgamesh, because it is a living narrative. Its self aware of this feature. In the opening lines it’s aware that it will be around for as long as it has been. After working on the silkscreen cyanotype prints for a year, in 2015 news broke that new lines of the epic were uncovered by archaeologists. I mean this was BIG news, similar to your favorite tv show that had been cancelled coming  back for a special episode over 2,000 years later. The new lines change the entire story; the way it has been read, the characters, their intentions, everything. The forest guardian Humbaba, previously read as a monstrous ogre, is actually a man, speaking in poetic lines, he has a family and the forest is his partner so to speak. These are events right in the middle of the story and so it changed the way I saw the characters. Gilgamesh and Enkiu are not ‘heroes’ in the common sense of the word. They are flawed in seeking fame, destroying the sacred forest, killing Humbaba and having to deal with the consequences. They have an intensely human quality and complex relationship to nature and ownership over it. It has a pulse in today's world economy because we are still grappling with these questions in the face of Climate change and deforestation. This body of work reinterprets the hero archetype as complex, and perception based. The original title of the poem is “He who Saw The Deep”  but it's translated as “The Epic of Gilgamesh.” Most readers interpret the story’s title as having to do with this singular hero figure but the new lines contest this idea. In fact i argue Enkidu is the real hero in the archetypical sense as he makes the ultimate sacrifice. Of course Enkidu doesn't get to tell his story so Gilgamesh by default is championed as the hero but really he’s just the one that lives to tell the tale.

Can you share some insight into your installation approach for this exhibition? For example, Fishing (2017) floats away from the wall, partially concealing small objects placed on a shelf behind and Death of Enkidu is somewhat separated from other work by a large-scale textile piece hung from the ceiling. 
I chose to work with light fabrics like voile to go against the established model of the epic in visual art: you know super sized heavy paintings on canvas by Turner or Titian. I wanted to show that this poem is approachable, it can be embraced and even worn. I draw from architectural elements in the prints to create fabric sculptures. “Solstice” is a canopy or tent created and hung from a tree in Baxter’s street backyard. Its the same triangular structure the figures emerge from witnessed in “Remember Our arrival” 

‘Fishing” floats away from the wall to mirror the experience of fishing on a boat, floating away from land, from the ground. The objects behind it are ephemera from this activity, things they found, our pulled up from the deep, to give viewers something to discover while suggesting the possibility of the characters having really existed. Death of Enkidu is the hardest image for me in the series and I tucked it away for so long. It’s an image of Enkidu on the altar with the cosmos opening up above through a door while Gilgamesh mourns below. It is paired with an abstract fabric work titled “Shadow of a Mirror”, a poetic line borrowed from Wilson Harris, to somehow map Enkidu’s life journey from his birth, created by the God Ninsun and placed in the forest to be raised by animals and Humababa, then humanized through his sexual encounter with Shamhat and combat Gilgamesh, then returning to destroy the forest, killing Humababa and the bull of heaven prompted by Gilgamesh’s desire for fame, and being sentenced to die because of his actions. He is the shadow, Gilgamesh the mirror. I thought it was a beautiful way of summoning not only their relationship but the unsung Enkidu into the space.  

Works like Morning Raid are populated by numerous figures in various states of suspended movement, while others like Preparations for the Journey to the Cedar Forest or Death of Enkidu depict pairs of characters. How does the presence of the body, and more specifically your own body, function throughout your practice?
My body is all I have. It is the mechanism through which I synthesize my relation to light and air. It's the starting point of many of my investigations because I always start with how I feel about something but here I'll talk about perception. Dubois writes of double consciousness. I and many other artists of color would say at this point it's a triple or multi fold consciousness. In Morning Raid, for me it's about the multiple perspectives each figure has on the single action being performed. Based on where they are in the frame, their relation of this single event will vary. So it comes back to fact and truth. I work with the tradition Black portraiture in mind. A tradition of Black people authoring their own photographic images and putting it in the world. 

In what ways do you address current issues surrounding race, marginalization, and systems of power
Epic poems are used to promote ideology, nationhood/empire and power etc. I address these stated issues indirectly through imaginary made up fabulations twisting the epic to centralize the unseen or unheard. Like for example the black women who founded Buxton never centralized a single leader or heading. The village is the hero. It moves from singular to a collective. To Redress ways in which we culturally read history, and tell stories I hope can effect my personal need to rethink and rename most of the things I blindly accept. I’m just trying to grow and through my personal process of growth maybe others can see their own process reflected and feel empowered to shed leaves and keep growing. I mean at on point black people where not allowed to read. There’s a line between the literary and blackness. Our literary aesthetics was and still is oral and musical. Its all like traces. Our art is trace to the deep past. I stand up for myself and other when working with institutions. I’m drawn to stories that disrupt central narratives of power, heroism, and homeland. I’m a shifter. I can go anywhere and talk to anyone, I’m not an autochthon. Im not tied to one land. 

You’ve said that you first started taking photos as a teenager after your sister gave you a Canon AE-1. How do you feel your engagement with photography has developed over time since this early exploration and how do you anticipate it progressing in the future?
Printmaking honestly exploded how I see and make photographs. And moreover drawing is the shockwave from that explosion. I want to use photography to explore plasticity to confuse the distinctions I set up for myself. To make the photograph uncertain of itself. To make it doubt itself. In our current world photography is too sure of itself. It’s too factual. I hope to explore truth and the fabulous. 

In addition to photography and printmaking, you of work across digital collage, sculpture, performance, and sound. Do you find that there are relationships between these various approaches? 
My body synthesizes all of these approaches and create the links between them. Sometimes I’ll isolate on the specifics of one or create a work borrowing from multiple techniques and strategies. However I often use the langue of sound and music as a metaphor to understand my visual work and vice versa. Sometimes is more helpful to speak in tongues in a language a part from the one the medium is rooted in to arrive somewhere else.

Are there particular musicians who are important to you—or have influenced your sound work?
On the jazz side Sun Ra, most recently Gulcher Lustwerk, SA-RA is forever major! Liz Phillips is sound art royalty. Alice Coltrane is infinite. this is an unfair question, too many to name!

In one of your statements you mention a “passion for food, conversation, fashion, and family.” Can you talk more about these or other interests you have outside of art-making?
All of my interests are filtered by my love for art. I’m the kind of artist or hope to be the kind that doesn’t punch out, I’m off the clock. It’s a way to help me learn to live fully. To appreciate things for the way they simply are. so making pies, or learning chords, or packing a barrel with my mom to send to GT, or going with my dad to his papaya farm I hope to bring that perspective to fully soak in and reflect. Now obviously when it come to physically making objects that a different level of discipline and you need to take a break from time to time. I don’t like the ‘omg I have to always be productive all the time.’ I try to find my worth in interacting with my surroundings, history, my community, and people I care about. Along the way something sticks out and I use it as fuel for the work. The work can be about anything but my number one criteria is it must have spirit. I’m a work in progress you know.

Who are some contemporary artists you’re currently excited about or know feel your work is in conversation with?
All the folks who work with cyanotypes. All the folks who make work about memory, or work from/build archives. All folk who work in expressing blackness in all its fabulous shades. All folks who draw. But to name a few: iris Yuri Hu, Keisha Scarville, Robin Coste Lewis, Rasheed Johnson, Michael Armitage.

Over the years you’ve attended several residencies including ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, Pioneer Works, and the Lower East Side Printshop. Have you had a residency experience that was especially impactful or supportive of your practice? This is a hard one. I think Lower East side printshop expanded my practice the most as it introduced me to the possibilities of printmaking. Vermont Studio Center was my first residency ever and that allowed me to play in a new place and build relationships within a community of practicing artists. Residencies are support important for growth, and i’m coming to understand that while i work well under a time constraint, I want to push for a more grounded studio practice.  
Most recently, you spent six weeks at Civitella Ranieri, a 15th century castle in Umbria. What did you work on during your time there? At Civitella I began work on my largest piece yet, an 11 yard scroll of paper that contains imagery made with cyanotype and water color. I made the piece one the flour drawing with brush attached to a pole. It felt great to draw on that scale and to walk while drawing a line. I also recorded sound work in a 15th century chapel dedicated to Saint Christopher playing improvised organ and synth. I have many hours of material that I am still working through. Not sure exactly what it will culminate in but right now its an archive of sounds screams, prayers, birds, pop songs, and free jazzy soulful organ sounds. 

What’s next for you? Do you have any upcoming projects, exhibitions, residencies, or other news you’d like to share?
My next upcoming project is a commission by the Zuckerman Brain Neuroscience Institute at Columbia University. I created small drawings inspired by conversations with neuroscientists and the aesthetics of their instruments. Then I blow up these small drawings onto both sides of two large scale panels of transparent plexiglass coated in reflective holographic vinyl with parts of my body such as microscopic hair follicles, and an MRI of my brain printed with large scale silkscreen along with hand drawings using dry erase markers. The pieces are for their education labs and displayed on the ground floor of the Renzo Piano building located on 125th and broadway. A part of my concept was based on endogenous and exogenous processes that originate either inside or outside of a body, or a cell, or a building prompting people on the street to be drawn to the reflective surface of the pieces seeing themselves while being able to see through the transparent parts of the panels into the education space. The commissioned panels will be on display from Dec 13 2019 to Dec 13, 2020. I’m really excited because this opportunity gave me the chance to incorporate scientific imagery and research methods and aesthetics into my practice and I'm curious how these experiences and tools will translate in my practice that deals with epic poetry and world building.