Seascapes, Snowscapes, Kukeri
2023-ongoing
Notes: Kukeri are a pagan ritual in Bulgaria which involves figures clad in animal skins and cowbells who descend upon villages at the end of February causing a cacophonous procession. The noise is meant to clear away the evil spirits and bring about rebirth. I love the “upside-downness” of the logic and the reverie in “in-betweenness”. I explore figuration in the paintings not as an image but as an embodied feeling. The drawing often suggests limbs, eyes, breasts, etc. I refer to these occasions of recognition as “moments of intimacy” available to the observer. The Kukeri, a hybrid creature whose outer appearance is invented and hand-made by each performer offers me an attitude of wonder/wander and no formal binds. It’s not an idea but a way of being.
Iva’s paintings have undergone yet another momentous change. Painting and collaging over many of her earlier color paintings, Iva’s paintings, previously wildly active, have become silent. They make me aware of how self-consciously approachable and eager to please most paintings that one sees within the confines of the commercial art world are. Iva’s new paintings are stony and arid as the weeks and months after horrific events. The unfussy grey surfaces of the paintings are like sheer cliff walls. Delicately desiccated drawings of females are etched across these impervious surfaces – the fates of women in history, individuals, with their soft , floppy breasts, knobby knees and angular arms, (more than half of the world’s population) float past and are buried deep within the cliffs.
- Dona Nelson, April 2021
Iva’s current body of images are perhaps her most spiritual and allude to a metaphysical component. That’s not to say that they adhere to or promote any religious ideology, but these works bear some similarities to a number of talismanic textiles. Some of these new works are painted on unstretched canvas and hang from wooden devices. These pieces have a raw energy almost as if they were the hides of some recent kill. The works also feel less like they were painted and more like the images were somehow absorbed or burned into the ground. I’m reminded of a Rorschach test or the Shroud of Turin, especially in the cases where the silhouettes of human forms seem to bleed into focus.
- Trenton Doyle Hancock, April 2021
“Intersection” is a site-specific project dedicated to exploring the interconnectivity of painting, sound, dance, and film. The goal is to construct a non-hierarchical entwinement of these traditionally separate mediums. The entwinement prioritizes sensation, embodiment, and synesthesia. The artists rely on improvisation, play, and dialoguing, and the let’s-say-“tactile” intertwining of one’s physical being with the spatio-temporal fabric in which one exists.The sound is produced and performed by Matt McGarvey (Unthem: LISTEN NOW) and pianist Phil Skaller.
I dreamt I was standing on a picnic table at the airport in Hawaii swallowing clouds.
- Iva Gueorguieva Summer 2020
