Journal of Student Research 2023

The strewn evidence meant something

95

The strewn evidence meant something

Zach Zajda Senior, B.F.A. Studio Art: Painting; Minor: Art History Faculty Mentors: Daniel Atyim, Morgan Barrie

Artist Statement “There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.” —David Foster Wallace, Forever Overhead I believe in art as evidence. As a record of time and kinesis and a respite from the noise of each. My current work searches for personal, visual affirmations which lie in the poetics between representation and abstraction. I seek imperfect tautologies: self-evident statements undermined and obscured by the way they are told. Unities of content and form which appear unintelligible at a glance while hiding rarer truths. Ultimately, I rely on the mediation and crystallization of time while asserting luck, improvisation, and dreams as the only guiding principles one can authentically trust. And though I embrace ambiguous irresolution, I am not immune to the comforts of clarity. If there is one thing I hope my art might advocate, even if only by arrangement in color and composition, it is that we should live in softer worlds. Worlds with less pain—less perjury—and more beauty. Studio Painting II presents an interior scene punctuated with seated figures (painted from life). The piece is composed of two separate paintings of the same location which began on isolated sheets of paper. These initial works were cut into pieces and assembled—along with additional scraps of paper—into a larger, fragmented context. After stapling this refreshed composition into place, I continued to modulate the painted space and the people within it until an unanticipated level of finish revealed itself. The Garden and at left arose from imagined still life objects and spaces. Furniture, fruit, and mundane objects within lightful interiors provided a stage for the exploration of intuitive mark-making and its opposite. As I scribbled, every successive mark tried to rule out the one that preceded it and proffer a new image, connotation, or allusion elsewhere in the composition. Working in this way, I reflexively attempted to undo, redo, and get lost. Moments of pleasant surprise in the form of humor and beauty abstracted my imagined, illusive objects and made them mean multiple things. Somehow, this natural embodying of energy distilled lucidity. Pure Hollywood sought to remember, glorify, and satirize a scene of communal consumption—a distinct moment in time. My frenetic use of varied mediums allowed the work to grow and change. Layering over my favorite sections of the painting with fresh paper introduced chance, levity, and the conviction that nothing was lost so long as it remained underneath.