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IVAN
My work explores artificial environments and the decline of wild natural habitats. The objects I create, such as paintings, dioramas, vertical gardens, tables, or composites thereof, have an independent life, guided purely by aesthetic non-environmental goals. This contradiction between design and environmental activism is a driving force in my work. My work draws from the mapping of hurricane floods, urban sprawls, habitat loss, and contemporary landscape design. While drawing from these sources, I create fictional settings that are based on surrealist experiments. Some of these experiments include inverting water and land, representing water with an alarming hot pink, integrating sustainable vertical gardens with dwarf plants to represent forest canopies, re-purposing modular IKEA panels, and using artificial plants in conjunction with watering systems. These elements together form an open-ended visual narrative about the hybrid nature of our world, and about the perversion of the human impact on the wild natural environment. These environmental narratives are not mere illustrations of environmental messages but abstract visual syntheses, which I complete through exploration of the aesthetic ideals of balance and beauty, of the fashionable, and of the strange and sublime. In this way, my work further examines the complex and controversial nature of human desire as a driving force behind our consumerism and behind our environmental actions. |