NATURAL/WONDER(2018)

Ivancovich composed “NATURAL/WONDER” at a time when he was debilitated by illness and wished to express a heightened sense of both the proximity of death and the richness of life and art; and indeed, his first art series juxtaposes personal with political, camp with uncanny, and antique with modern. Inspired by Dutch Golden Age painters such as Balthasar van der Ast and Jacob Vosmaer, it queers and updates the still life form to resemble Hollywood aesthetics, contemporary consumer culture, and fashion photography in all its kitsch, lusciousness and surreal sexuality.

In these unabashedly sensual prints, pineapples and grapes add to an air of opulence. A longtime collector, many of the curio featured are sourced from the artist’s Mughal-influenced home, while he also uses his experience as a landscape designer to arrange semi-real floral centrepieces. Glints of taxidermic malice lie beneath such abundance, while fallen flowers and petals reinforce traditional still life themes of transience and loss. An admirer of Audubon’s “The Birds of America”, Ivancovich uses a range of birds, including a toucan, parrot and egret, as genial focal points for certain of the compositions. Just like nature books or documentaries, each tableau presents a kinetic ecosystem of enhanced beauty and danger: birds, insects, snakes, scorpions and crabs appear to interact, in a manner by turns playful and predatory.

A layer of irony can be said to swathe the ‘natural’ element of the title: backgrounds, including latex, bubble wrap, and lame from local Hollywood fabric stores, slyly critique the politics of overconsumption and ecological destruction. The ‘wonder’ part is less ironized, the pieces allowing space for a negative capability of wonderment, finding infectious joy in the materials and illusions of modernity. In a sister series of the same photographs, pixellated, that sense of beauty is more obscured – a nod perhaps to the artist’s then illness, or perhaps to the over reproduction of images in digital life.

“NATURAL/WONDER” was presented in a solo show at Fabrik Projects in 2018.