Zack Davis

Interview by Naz Cuguoğlu

How would you define your practice? What are some underlining, repeating themes? What are the questions you come back to eventually?

The underlying question for me is about learning. How does something like a concept or a situation, even a relationship, come from outside of awareness, beyond sensitivity, to being real for someone? It’s a physical process and a cultural process, with all kinds of motifs that come out of academic research and folk imagination.

I feel like failure, mistakes, chances play a role in your practice — impossible to see shaky videos of airplanes projected in a dark room, a wall vinyl that had been scored by the cutter without separating, outdoor movie screenings which nobody showed up for. In the capitalist society, failures are the culprits, residuals to get rid of, problems to be solved. What do you think of this?

Unresolved images or concepts are important to me, but I’m attracted to clarity and containment. Projects with a margin for failure or technical malfunction can rescue me from that. That’s one of the ways that a project can get beyond what I already knew going into it, although it’s usually a struggle to realize it. Problems of materials and processes open me up. Ideas hover around and get tangled up in the dynamics of the stuff.

All gradients, including success-failure and central-residual, have the potential to be arbitraged for profit, so rather than solving or getting rid of things, I think capitalist society maintains and increases the distance or tension between the “good” and the “bad.” I don’t think getting power from those tensions is distinctive to this society, but this society has defined more human beings into the extreme role of waste or criminal, for profit, than probably any other in history.

Relational Aesthetics seems relevant, as well. A dance studio, a library, a Halloween party — these are all places for people and encounters. What is the role of community building in your practice? How do humans play a role?

Right after undergrad, some friends and I moved to Portland and started a project space out of our garage. We were influenced by reading about landscape urbanism, but there was no plan or program. Gradually it turned into a gallery, and then a residency, and through contact with some amazing people there, I decided to be an artist. So, the course of my life so far has been determined by the willingness of people to hang out and participate in a community or an extended conversation.

The Halloween party was a collaboration and a consecration of our studios. Some people will remember or think of the space differently because of it. Some level of collective memory is the best place we could hope for our work to end up.

Can you tell us more about your works Food Web and How Exactly Like a Boy? How did you become interested in a 3D-printed structure? What potentialities do you see in this form?

I’m still trying to figure out How Exactly Like a Boy. It started from a desire to shrink an image like glass artists do with millefiori, but to keep pulling it until it was beyond microscopic, like a postcard to another level of existence. Nothing was working, so I thought that maybe I could do it with a cone of projected light. I was trying out different videos and finally had a moment where an embryo was forming its first fold, the image was being incarnated as a volume in the soap, and it was legible volume only because it was a simple linear enclosure. The interiority-in-formation would be carried through the whole life of the animal, from one scale to another. The title comes from Peter Pan when he’s trying to glue his shadow to his body with soap.

Food Web started as an experiment to catch light in the same way but to do it with a macroscopic, visible structure. In different pieces, I keep coming back to this beam of light that doesn’t illuminate anything but becomes visible itself, but only to the extent that it’s scattered and weakened.

Most 3-D printers, to make an overhang, have to build a support structure below it. Food Web is all support — the shape the printer thought it was making was above the “working envelope” and couldn’t be printed. I started to associate the geometry of the fibers with diagrams of language and neural nets, so I thought that maybe I could suspend ideas in there. Bird ideas, since I made a constellation of different seeds and dried berries. Maybe a mental map of where the good bushes are. The whole thing compresses and actually bounces. Fruits get shipped around in plastic meshes like this, too, for the same reason.

You also produce sculptures made out of heat-shrink electrical sleeving and found objects. Is this a way to reassign roles to them, to make them reusable and relevant by recycling them?

To me, it’s more about masking the objects’ roles. The specific things are in there, but they’re covered over by the collective “signature” of the new category. That’s the reason I left the tubes open-ended, so they could actually be any length. I’m trying to imagine a perspective outside of this crazy machine we live in, where none of our stuff is recognizable or fits into an easy existing category.

I don’t know if that is the perspective of a baby or an anthropologist or a machine, and the “view” from that perspective changes in tone. Sometimes it’s like Dr. Seuss, warm and curious in a world of funny tube-machines. Sometimes it seems monstrous, like the rift dimension in the Pacific Rim movies, with all the creatures in series on an assembly-line that looks like a strand of DNA. The actual product design is being automated. Software is learning from a million examples and spewing out options. Automated logo design is one example that’s everywhere.

What have you been reading, listening to, and watching? Where / from whom do you get your brain juice?

At night I’ve been watching Terrace House on Netflix or reading John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, which beautifully folds together geological time and people time. In the day, for school, I’ve been reading all kinds of art and critical theory, which I feel like I finally have the specialist language to access. That’s been embarrassingly exciting.

Thinking about the current moment of the pandemic, how do you envision the future of art? I believe that speculative fiction allows us to construct alternative realities. Daydreaming is the first step towards action. What would your speculative fiction for the art world look like?

Here’s my vision: The only culturally acceptable use of digital technology is in the medical field. The tech industry takes a hippocratic oath and devotes itself exclusively and directly to the care of people’s bodies and minds. We prioritize self-knowledge.

Near term: the garage space I talked about before happened at the peak of the 2008 recession in a city that was already in its own local slump. Our jobs were irregular retail. There was nothing to do except utopian gestures and art projects and starting bands. Profit motives were out of the question, and that enabled some things. I would like to see an economic model that isn’t winner-take-all, where art doesn’t function as a tax-free investment. If that means no artist gets a hundred thousand dollars to fabricate a sculpture, that’s okay with me.

Return to Zack Davis’ portfolio.