Prompted production

Ivoire Foreman

Interview by L. Valena

Can you first just describe to me what you responded to?

I think it was little bit of everything. I think I responded a lot to the energy that I felt in the image. Both imagery, energy, and it seemed like a lot of possibilities. And then I think also I was also adding in where I was, and where I wasn't. I was in the middle of Vermont, in the middle of nowhere- not in a city, which is where I normally live.

That idea of being in multiple places at once, in your mind?

Yeah.

What happened next?

At first, I was thinking about it, and I think because there's so much energy in it, and it's a photo, so it's still and silent. So I was kind of wanting to play with that, and being in the middle of nowhere, where it's completely silent. At first I was thinking about just have an image of the city and the sounds of stillness, but stillness is pretty quiet. So I was thinking about the play of the image and the sound, so I decided to flip it. While filling your eyes with an image, create as much of a lack of image as I could. And allow the sound, but it goes back and forth between what's important.

That's so cool. So it's almost like you inverted this image. You're right- there's so much sound in the image that your brain just kind of puts there. So you filmed this in Vermont, and then made recordings on the street?

Yeah. Ish. I did recordings on the street, and recordings in my house. I think a lot of things in and around it to was- there's layers. In my work in general there's always a lot of layers as well, and in the original image it felt like there were a lot of layers. Was the photograph taken from a bus, or inside a window? Recording the video, and with that I just got this surface tablet. I had just gone to this workshop- you know those weird art workshops. I took some sort of nerdy graphics workshop, and they gave us the sign-in for their Adobe creative cloud. So the layers in this piece were also the layers in my learning curve, because I was learning how to do it through these tutorials. I've done video before, just never with this software. And then with the audio, that piece was originally written for part of this video I made in grad school about my feelings about New York City. It was just a very tiny piece where I was working in circles within circles in video. And I had always wanted to take it more and expand on it. The way it ended was really different, because it was about how I felt about New York City at that time. So there's also the layers of me talking about myself in New York City, in the past, in the past. The original writing was me talking about it a year before that, and now it's been like three years since then. The layers of that. And in some of that, I've been able to see how I've grown, and those things that I had kind of put in. Most of that build me up stuff isn't that intense, but it was kind of interesting to take that, and look at it from the other side. As someone who grew up in the nineties, and understands therapy to some extent, grows from trauma and rewriting endings, it was also awesome to change the narrative about how I felt about New York City when I first moved here. And to make a video that I'm more excited about than the original one I made. These layers of change.

It's like you've paired these layers of sound and images with this biographical piece, and that kind of tracks with the learning curve. It's cool.

Yeah, it felt like this weird culmination. And it's interesting, because at no point did I... at one point, when I was lining up the video with the sound, I decided to make sure that I wasn't trying to achieve anything. But it's nice, because when the camera is at it's apex is when it's talking about going up. It always sort of fits into place like that, which I think is really awesome and magical.

I definitely assumed that was intentional- and I thought it was cool that there was a climax.

And I think that also plays into growth. In other things, when I spend a good amount of time. Sometimes it takes longer to produce pieces, but a lot of the work is in my head now, instead of construction. But with that, I realized that I also have an eye, and I did go to grad school. It's cool that within that work, there's a learning curve, but sometimes I'm already there, which is really exciting. I don't necessarily need to line it up, because I know it will.

That confidence is such a big deal, and it's so hard won. It's such a crazy thing to work towards.

One thing that was really exciting was the ability to see what I did in grad school, and how prolific I was, and to go back to my hypothetical self before I even started that, and give myself this pep talk to what I knew I was already going to do. It's really easy to pump yourself up when you know how things turn out. But it was also a really awesome practice. Even though I was thinking to myself then, it is very applicable to myself now. Some of it is coding to me now.

So you're talking to your past self as well as to your current self.

I think we always need to be. I think my life goal is to always be slightly in love with my past self. Just because I'm so good to me. I always want to take the me of five minutes ago on a date. You know, they put socks in my backpack...

Oh, that's so nice of them!

Seriously. Ivoire, I love you! They're always just too busy though.

That's so much nicer than what I have going. I actually have a passive aggressive note from my future self on the door of my studio that says "Did you forget to clean up your mess?"

Yeah, that totally just makes Present You say "Whatever".

Exactly. You think you know me, Future Lu? You don't know me.

I like this mess. I've grown out of that clean stuff.

Do you have anything else you want to say about this process, or about what you made?

My process varies from thing to thing, and with writing, it's more that I walk dogs and write things in my head, and them write in my phone. That was the biggest thing for me- the fact that it was kind of a layered and circular process. Realizing what I've learned, and seeing where I am, it was kind of one of those weird pivotal things, accidentally.

Do you have any advice for someone else doing this?

I would say to not think too much about it. To not feel like it will be a seamless transfer, because it will be.

Call Number: C25VA | C29FI.foPro

Ivoire Foreman is a black, queer and trans maker and a mixer. They employ a melange of media, experiences, pop culture, childhood, time periods, sound, Trans magic, multiple mediums and uncomfortableness - each filtered through assemblage processes. The results are contemporary art that re(re)appropriates, reflects and distorts dysphoria and marginalization while offering validation through visibility.

Born in Tucson Arizona in 1982, Ivoire is heavily influenced by Faith Ringgold, Lisa Frank, Kara Walker, Ebony Patterson, Sara Sze, Queer Black intersectional feminism, Barbra Kruger, Neil Gaiman, Octavia Butler, comics, video games, science fiction, John Cage, and Space. They hold an MFA in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts, NYC. They live, create, make, and work in Brooklyn, New York.

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