DENSE LIGHTNESS

Baxter Street at Camera Club of New York, New York, NY | October 2018-January 2019

Artist: Ivan Forde

Dense Lightness was a solo exhibition of work by Ivan Forde, bringing together multimedia works from the artist’s interdisciplinary experimentations with cyanotype. Drawn from Forde’s long-term work and research around the ancient Mesopotamian epic poem Gilgamesh/He Who Saw The Deep, this installation invited visitors to experience the artist’s studio practice.

Forde inserts his own image into photographs and prints in order to embody fragments and motifs addressed in the Gilgamesh narrative from varying perspectives, assembling the imagery to create a poetic mirror of the artist as both subject and viewer. Rather than re-tell, represent, or illustrate the epic, Forde shifts our perspective toward Enkidu, Gilgamesh’s double, and considers the story as a point of departure for an exploration into the struggle between opposing spaces: public vs. private, destruction vs. creation, the self vs. the collective, abstraction vs. representation. His deliberate use of cyanotype becomes a constant thread through a multitude of experimentations with medium and style; the artist creates fabrics, sound collages, sculpture, writing and prints from photographic performances. Throughout the narrative, polarities of personalities, environments, and power are constantly matched against each other. Forde’s work explores the nuances that lie in between such oppositions, mining the complex nature of harmony in the face of conflict, and how these divergent subtleties are reflected in contemporary discussions on marginalized identities, environmental issues, and systems of power.