Ivan Forde
About the Artist
Ivan Forde is a Guyanese-born, Harlem-raised artist who works across printmaking, digital animation, sound performance, and installation. Using a wide variety of photo-based and print-making processes, Forde retells stories from epic poetry by casting himself as every character. His non-linear versions of these tales open the possibility of new archetypes and alternative endings. By crafting unique mythology and inserting himself in historical narratives, he connects the personal to the universal and offers a transformative view of prevailing stories in the broader culture.Morning Raid is one work from Forde’s Illumination series (2016-2018), which incorporates the Epic of Gilgamesh to explore multiplicity and diversity using the black body as the subject of the poetical narrative. His most recent series of cyanotype-based works, Invocation (2018-2019), centers on the collective tales passed down from the people of his grandmother's village, Buxton, one of the first Afro-Guyanese villages founded by former slaves after the 1838 emancipation. Earlier bodies of work like Transformation (2012) about the 17th-century allegory, Paradise Lost, edge closer to surrealist self-portraits showing the artist in various states of metamorphosis.
