Ilana Savdie

For Ilana Savdie’s first solo exhibition at Deli Gallery, the artist presents Swimming in Contaminated Waters, an exhibition that includes TK new paintings. While inspired by carnivalesque themes of defiance through the disruption of normative order, the use of the exaggerated human form as a tool of resistance, and the physiological behavior of living organisms, Savdie’s paintings are ecstatic assemblages of bodies that exist in, and locate power through simultaneity.

Savdie’s work explores the human body through stretching, reconfiguration, and manipulation, mapping new paths of agency and intimacy for identities deemed less than convenient. Indeterminate conditions featuring elongated limbs, bodily content, parasitic bodies in states of invasion, and manicured expressive hands ooze in and out of themselves, and put into question the porous boundary of what constitutes a body and what or who leaks out into space.

Savdie has a penchant for the juxtaposition of colors and textures that “don’t seem to fit right together” as her canvases incorporate a cacophony of acid greens, magentas, reds, yellows, and blues—colors that reference the abundance seen during the carnival she was raised around. The incorporation of wax applied with control on the canvas and the experimentation with slick surfaces and patterns, gesture to bodily textures in their seductive yet repulsive qualities and the materiality of living organisms when seen through the lens of a microscope.

Present in Savdie’s canvases are features of the Marimondas, a popular icon from her hometown in Barranquilla, Colombia. Featuring long noses and floppy ears, folklore says these exaggerated characters originated as a means of mocking an oppressive elite and have recently been converted into a prominent figure of the Carnaval de Barranquilla. In Savdie’s hands, features of the Marimonda are utilized as a way to locate the figures on the canvas as well as subject matter, bringing to fore the complexity of the character’s history and the carnivalesque themes of releasing impulses that threaten social order.

Central to Savdie’s work are questions concerning ambiguity, the fluidity of identity, and how nonconforming bodies that find citizenship in margins can reclaim or displace power through transgression and resistance. If, as the late Cuban-American queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz posited, a queer aesthetics is “at once a negation of ‘what merely is’ and a pointing to what could and should be”, then the carnival, a space where normative order and social stability are momentarily suspended, is where queerness is better embodied. In this suspension, where the caricature and folkloric meet the clinical and the biological, where the unfamiliar and the familiar coexist, Savdie locates a place of belonging and an empowered history for the body in a constant state of becoming.

Ultimately painting, for Savdie, becomes a physical act in which to question agency and power through imposing and subverting leaky boundaries. In Savdie’s words, “Painting serves as a reminder that I have a body, beyond my teeth that grind, with which I can pervert, rescale, reconfigure, and reroute the paths of power in the figures that coexist intimately on the canvas as contrasting textures, gestures, and colors. I see these gestures as organs, fractured bones, unbound parts that displace the equilibrium of power and dependence.”

—Rosario Güiraldes, 2021

Ilana Savdie (b. 1986) was raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and currently lives and works between Brooklyn, NY and New Haven, Connecticut. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018, and holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Savdie held a solo exhibition previously at ltd Los Angeles, and has been involved in recent group exhibitions at Fredric Snitzer Gallery (Miami) the Museum aan de Stroom and CASSTL Gallery (Antwerp, Belgium), Golestani Gallery (Düsseldorf, Germany), Jack Barett (NY), Essex Flowers (NY), and Diane Rosenstein (LA). Ilana was awarded the 2020 TOY Foundation fellowship and the 2020 NXTHVN studio fellowship where she is currently an artist in residence until May of 2021.