In early 2023, Iva began what would become a year-long correspondence with Patrick Theimer that explores the tenacity and ambition of her multidisciplinary practice. The following is an excerpt from that exchange, and the full conversation will become available soon. Be sure to stay connected for more...
Around March 2018 I had a “fuck it” moment.
I had been feeling burdened by my work. Physical, emotional and financial precarity was suffocating me. I developed this gnawing doubt, this need to know for sure that I could make my work, even if I had to make it in an alley. I took an 80”x120” roll of raw muslin and simply let it fall to the ground. I wanted to make my paintings unburdened. No structure, no trained eyes, no sense of purpose aside from recording the terrain with my 15” wide brush. I needed to start over.
Looking back, I suspect much of this new urgency was actually rooted in the Talisman Debris sculptures I had been making for almost a decade, as well as a series of unstretched battle paintings I made back in graduate school. Warrior from 1998 in particular still haunts my imagination. I had been making the sculptures from scavenged metal and concrete and pieces of muslin carefully wrapped and glued together around an armature that left bruises on me as I worked. Ultimately the sculptures proved to be a hardship, manifestations of broken and distorted paintings that carried my past.
But it was my life. My family and I came to the United States as refugees in 1990, and it was the migration of a lineage burdened by loss, exile and grief, fleeing with nowhere to go. It was an experience of borders, of precarity. Those sculptures were another border, another fight to find the space to stand. And then I realized it was its own exile.
So I returned to the tapestries as a way of letting go, the muslin pulled like sails from the carcass of the sculpted armatures. I felt a wild exuberance. You can see it in Dona In the Garden, a work I draped over a large ladder to complete, forcing me to work in the round, unable to see the whole. And I worked on the floor but never adjusted or “fixed” them once pinned to the wall. It was a very different way of seeing/feeling.
Over time the color muted and figuration emerged, female-bodied beings propping and pulling each other up, something reminiscent of Tintoretto’s battle scenes. But that was important because soon the horrors of Covid slowly consumed us, and now I had more to bury. My drawing took over, figures struggling in the war of an epidemic, and I must have completed close to a hundred works with ink on paper to work out what I felt was all around me.
You single out Nestinarki and I am glad. It holds so much: the color, the layers of gesso, the washes of black, the contours of multiple bodies in a frenzied thumping gathering. But what also makes it so significant is that I made it by erasing a previous painting with gesso and thin washes of black which in turn responded to the terrain and the figuration that emerged. I followed this act and took a finished and stretched painting in my studio – 110” x 80” – which was heavily collaged with a rough and intensely colorful surface. I painted over it first with white gesso and then with thin washes of paint. Working quickly in response to the surface I drew with an old brush dipped in black acrylic multiple big breasted humanoid creatures. Thus “And She Cried for the Weekend” came into being and was the first in the Pompeii gray series. I wanted to seal up the cubist space and make it skull-like, bleach its surfaces to be made smooth along its landscape of canyons and caves. The frame felt like an archaeologist's sieve shaken to reveal the fragments of anthropological remains, of my remains. And now this rectangle, this sacred shape of painting, acquired a different function. The edges held the fragments and all I had to do was trace the silhouettes and stories of seemingly ancient beings. I drew in the manner I imagined our Neanderthal ancestors did as they used the terrain of the wall to probe and guide imagination. I was paying attention to the bumps, witnessing the images emerge, recording the act of my destruction as my construction. I buried everything in it and kept going. I took another and did it again, and another, and another. Each painting had already existed, each had a very specific history. But this time I could hear and feel each painting as I worked, I knew where I needed to go with no interruption. I completed each in a single sitting including Was Four Maidens. I destroyed everything to keep going.
I had been scribbling the phrase “Pompeii gray” for months at this point and it now made sense. These paintings became the recording of the pandemic and all the things it revealed and concealed about politics, infrastructure, our bodies and our souls. They are not a gray sorrow … they are renewal, hope, life. They are animals, wolves, horses and dogs and small plants and many large breasted beings, part animal and part human, pieces of me and all that surrounded me, searching. They are alone, isolated, surviving. They are the longing I held to desperately feel a stranger’s breath on my neck. They are the real.
More recently, I let color back in with trepidation reflecting the palette of the White Mountains near Lone Pine, CA where I would spend time with my family looking for petroglyphs and collecting rocks. My experiences in the desert have a significant impact on my practice…the silence, the wind, the expanse of space so great as to bend the horizon. It’s a sense of density and voidness inflicted by grids for subdivisions never built, by the brutal mining and the irrigation canals that run like massive land scars still so visible and hurting. In these deserts I witness the extreme range of scale of human marks, from abandoned aircraft landing strips to tunnels 1 mile long made by hand (Burro Schmidt dug his tunnel in the granite by hand for more than 35 years) to ladder and spiral shaped markings left by native people in the rocks. It obliterates any manageable sense of proportion for me. Everything seems to exceed one’s learned perception.
It helped, too, to rediscover Miro’s late paintings, especially the mural paintings for his Temple series 1961-62. By that time his color feels like it has simply settled in place, like dew. The paintings with their brushy surfaces, curved horizons and humming color appear as fields, as scapes. There is an abandon in them, and a sense of release. And humor. Miro is playing, and I love that because it’s so damn serious. In fact, I truly believe that it’s essential to the survival of my own imagination.
And now there is Snowcape: Excavation, a dense terrain of many buried paintings, my starting over never seems quite done. The top layer of white gauze and delicate rust-colored lines dematerialize the weight of what lies below. They suggest undulating waves, wind and shimmering light. Still, I have let go of so much.
I had a dream during the lockdown that I was standing on a picnic table at the airport in Hawaii swallowing clouds.
So that’s a long answer to your question, How? But in short: my abstraction is a surface for entropy, for nature. Every utterance leaves a trace. Everything is a process of erosion and sedimentation and new beginnings. All is in motion. The owl sweeps, its wings touch the fresh layer of snow leaving a trace, an imprint of its flesh and blood, intricate and silent.