Ivan Forde
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Ivan Forde
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Morning Raid, cyanotype and thread, 2017
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2020-08-28T18:29:14+00:00
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.
Artist's WebsiteAbout the Work
Morning Raid explores the poetics surrounding ideas of homeland, migration, and identity. Forde was inspired by Eternity to Season, a collections of poems written by British-Guyanese author Sir Wilson Harris in 1954. In some of these poems, Harris transforms characters from the Odyssey and the Epic of Gilgamesh into different facets of the self set within villages on the Guyana coastline. Similarly, Forde uses photomontage to insert himself into the cyanotype's dream-like merging of past and present, fantasy and fact. By placing himself within the poetic narrative, Forde retells old stories for contemporary life. Morning Raid, which features a series of self-portraits working together to bring down the largest tree, references the story of the cedar forest in Tablet V of the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Forde's ambiguous presentation of time and space is paralleled by his own experience living the "half between space" between Harlem and his hometown of Timehri. Although alienating at first, Forde suggests that the post-colonial experience allows him and other British-Guyanese artists to foster new and enlightening perspectives on the human condition. Forde describes how his art allows him to "migrate in a sense."“I position my body within landscapes of the Odyssey, or Paradise Lost, of 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 art 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."
Other Performances
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