“Ivan Forde: Dense Lightness” at Baxter St Camera Club
Ivan Forde: Dense Lightness
Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York
November 8 — December 15, 2018
Opening Reception Thursday, November 8 from 6–8pm
Performance on Thursday, November 29th at 7 pm
Dense Lightness is Forde’s first solo exhibition, 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 invites 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. As part of the exhibition, Forde will stage a sound performance within the installation on November 29th, reading text from his research that also riffs off of selected verses from the Gilgamesh epic.
Read more about this exhibition via Baxter St.
