I was born in ex-Yugoslavia—a country that no longer exists. The experience of living through its collapse didn’t inspire me to make art, but compelled me to become an artist.
During the civil war in the 1990s, I found healing by escaping Belgrade to immerse myself in wild nature. In those raw and magical landscapes, I came to understand that society is a fragile construct, resting on the foundation of the natural world. I realized that this natural environment, which shaped us, is now rare, precious, and alarmingly fragile.
After fleeing the war, I migrated to Toronto and then to New York City. Despite being an urbanite deeply engaged in art within metropolitan contexts, I continued to seek out wilderness. This personal journey—between city and nature—brought a healing process into my studio practice and ultimately to my audience. It expanded beyond personal and local experience into a global context, and into the idea of life as a Whole. The concept of the Whole is hard to grasp, and this became the subject of my work. I explored it in my 2007 solo show, Global Nature (Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia).
Living in culturally diverse environments like Queens, I’ve come to see that—even in the absence of war—there is a quieter, more universal crisis: the disorientation of the Anthropocene. This proposed geological epoch, marked by massive human impact on the planet—climate change, biodiversity loss, food insecurity—affects us not only physically and economically, but also psychologically and spiritually. It’s this deeper disconnection that I seek to explore in my work.
I believe we need more than ecological awareness; we need to reconnect with nature on a deeply intimate, even timeless level. To live in balance, we must grasp the environment as a Whole—something that’s increasingly difficult in our fragmented world.
Over the past 25 years, my work has evolved into an exploration of complex systems of interconnectedness—revealing how our relationship with the living environment shapes culture and identity. This wholeness often emerges through a vibrant, even mystical, experience of the sublime—where beauty meets threat, and hope threads through environmental uncertainty.
Ivan Stojakovic, 2024
Mining Fool’s Gold
I create my work to be seen as a bird’s eye view expedition overviewing human impact on Earth’s environment. The result is an unearthing of the Anthropocene. My paintings, sculptures and dioramas explore environmental issues such as plastic consumption, loss and reclaiming of wild habitats, and representations of Nature modified through digital remix and AI prompts. My work challenges viewer perception of what is natural and what is manmade, and asks the questions of value.
In my studio, I explore painting, collaging and sculpting with found industrial materials and with organic natural materials. I deeply engage with the process of multilayered integration and I strive to create rich and deep sensory experiences for the viewers to explore. Through a constructivist mixed media process, I build metaphors that serve as environmentally themed narrative possibilities. When working in this way, I naturally work the fine line between abstraction and representation.
How is your work ecological?
In my work, I create metaphorical meanings of ecological issues and parables that explore consumer desire in the context of living environment. For example: the idea behind Mining Fool’s Gold was to stage a visual metaphor centered around the meaning of misguided pursuits and human exploits of the Earth. The work connects the natural source with the man-made target while various meanings emerge in the possible readings, including reference to post-human excavations, also present in the Extraction series.
Your main medium has been painting. How does your painting relate to the ecological theme?
In Blue vs Blue series of paintings, I repurpose plastic bags by compressing them into bird’s eye views of terrains impregnated with microplastic and plastic sediments. In this process, I merge references to early maps with references to satellite images, and I merge drone views of primordial wilds with bird’s eye views of human-altered Earth. Some of my influences further include geological displays, sublime landscapes throughout the history of painting, and landscape design and architecture. I choose to fossilize one of the most iconic signifiers of our fossil fuel era – the mass produced plastic bags. My paintings comment on the permanency of plastic, and on the fact that it is part of Nature. I present my paintings to the viewer in a design conscious form of a serene and sublime natural beauty. This contradiction between design and environmental activism is a driving force in my work. In this way, my work further examines the complex and controversial nature of human desire as a driving force behind our consumerism and behind our environmental actions.
Blue vs Blue
In Blue vs Blue series of paintings, I repurpose found plastic bags by compressing them into abstract naturescapes. I engage in the process of transformation of the found plastic by utilizing its physical properties, the glues, and the resin top coat in a way that creates a new language of painting. In this process, I merge references to early maps with references to satellite images, and I merge drone views of primordial wilds with bird’s eye views of man-transformed Earth. In my work, I choose to fossilize one of the most iconic signifiers of our fossil fuel era – the mass produced plastic bags. My paintings comment on the permanency of plastic, and on the fact that it is part of Nature. I present my paintings to the viewer in a design conscious form of a serene and sublime natural beauty.
Ivan Stojakovic, 2024
Urban Wild
My work explores artificial environments and the decline of wild natural habitats. The objects I create, such as paintings, dioramas, vertical gardens, tables, or composites thereof, have an independent life, guided purely by aesthetic non-environmental goals. This contradiction between design and environmental activism is a driving force in my work.
My work draws from the mapping of hurricane floods, urban sprawls, habitat loss, and contemporary landscape design. While drawing from these sources, I create fictional settings that are based on surrealist experiments. Some of these experiments include inverting water and land, representing water with an alarming hot pink, integrating sustainable vertical gardens with dwarf plants to represent forest canopies, re-purposing modular IKEA panels, and using artificial plants in conjunction with watering systems. These elements together form an open-ended visual narrative about the hybrid nature of our world, and about the perversion of the human impact on the wild natural environment. These environmental narratives are not mere illustrations of environmental messages but abstract visual syntheses, which I complete through exploration of the aesthetic ideals of balance and beauty, of the fashionable, and of the strange and sublime. In this way, my work further examines the complex and controversial nature of human desire as a driving force behind our consumerism and behind our environmental actions.
* Most of the artworks that are designed for indoors contain a mix of artificial plants and the archival preserved plants (real dead plants turned into solid objects). There is no maintenance required for these artworks. There is no color change, falling apart, and/or decay in these artworks that is any different than what happens with plain oil painting on canvas.
* * Most of the artworks that are designed for outdoors are with live plants. These artworks require maintenance that is the same as maintenance of vertical plant walls – full tech support available, details upon request. These artworks are interactive with the audience as the audience is invited to participate in shaping the planted areas (can be a community garden). As opposed to capturing a single moment, these works with live plants encompass a full span of growth and change, through metamorphosis of live plants and through human interaction.
*** The freestanding sculptural tables merge Stojakovic’s artistic vision with furniture design.