DREAM/LAND (2021-2024)

To mark the centenary of the Hollywood sign, Ivancovich set out to create a series which captured the weirdness of the movies and, perhaps even more so, the deracinated bizarreness of living and working in the neighbourhood where it all began. Recontextualising Hollywood detritus sourced from threatened local prop, backdrop and taxidermy shops – such as a spaceship used as a model in the original “Star Trek” – he arranges them on sand or glitter in front of hand-painted Old Hollywood backdrops, honouring, lamenting and repurposing the craftsmanship of a lost era of cinema.

Shot in medium format, “DREAM/LAND”’s real tableaux offer dual antidotes to a film industry oversaturated with CGI and an art world inundated with artificial intelligence. In their maximalism, these compositions display unalloyed queer wonder at the rococo and artificial, their palate alluding to Jean-Honoré Fragonard. In their reserve, however, hints of unease peer through that façade – whether in the stillness of animals sourced from one of the last great Hollywood taxidermists (which supplies shows like “Palm Royale” and “Yellowstone”), or in the black and white versions of certain works, where Hollywood dream is transfigured into a twilight zone of nightmare.

From Georgia O’Keeffe to James Turrell, the desert is one of the chief sources of creativity for artists working in the western United States. Ivancovich’s surreal garden sandscape – formed of over seventy 50lb bags of pure sand on a base of decomposed granite, and on which most of “DREAM/LAND” is shot – underlines its constant presence in the imagination of Angelenos and lends the series a mirage-like quality. As well as harbouring oases and dousing fire, sand also forms the beaches which made the city of Los Angeles viable, and which are themselves steeped in myth. But sand, amorphous and neutral, is not just a metaphor for California’s topography but also the people who move there to forge an identity anew. Meanwhile, the 5ft long paper mâché and glitter “Hollyweird” sculpture, made by Ivancovich and shot in his home studio, uses glitter to represent the ideals after which those hopefuls strive.

Although a distinctly American iteration of Pop Art, “DREAM/LAND” references a cosmopolitan range of influences in European fashion, including Burberry’s knight and Alessandro Michele’s directorship of Gucci. With its shades of gothic melancholy and unheimlich, the series maintains an outsider’s distance from the dreamland of Hollywood, dealing in illusion and disillusionment in equal measure. A strictly limited edition of ten prints per composition, the series is the most complete instantiation so far of Ivancovich’s concept of ‘antique modern’, which seeks to infuse contemporary photography with forgotten or bygone traditions and crafts.