May 2015
Anti-Immersive Gallery
ABSTRACT:
Ultimately, the chicken crossed the road to get to the other side. ZATLAZ, an enigmatic artist in his own right, has reached the proverbial other side of the road. This posthumous show brings to light his final work: a series of photos both poignant and inscrutable. While his work has always possessed the opaque air of the most cryptic surrealists, it has consistently contradicted itself with its almost childish motifs and thematic imagery.
These photos, shown exclusively by ANTI-IMMERSIVE with cooperation from the ZATLAZ estate, depict the typical narrative arc of ZATLAZ work. While the work liberally employs familiar characters, narrative and compositional motifs of cinema and popular contemporary media, the real meat of the work lies in the implications of the comparatively simple choices undergone in the construction of the work.
In his previous series We are All Made of Scars, ZATLAZ used cardboard cutouts (as one would typically find in a movie theater or store display) of pop culture icons like Prince and Bart Simpson imposed on real environments in scenarios ranging from the benign to the condemning. The previously mentioned meat, resultant of the construction of the work, hides in the choices of characters, environments and relationships. In the piece Friends Contemplating their Mutual Differences the placement of cutouts of Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny in the empty cheap seats of the Great Western Forum beckons so much more of the viewer than the recognition of a Space Jam reference. Are we viewing a commentary on the artifice of sports appeal, the absurdity of popular media, or the theater of western hero worship? All of these assumptions and more can be made of the work, and yet in the most satisfyingly conspiratorial way none ever feels just right enough.
This series continues (to the end) this tradition of appropriation in service of abstract inquiry. The commandeering of popular iconography is by all means a ubiquitous artistic device, but as is typical with pop art it is normally used in an exclusively on-the-head manner. Little relevant artistic ground is gained collaging the smiling mugs of US presidents with documentary images of the war-dead, and it is in the work of ZATLAZ that we are given a welcome break from these simplistic and one-dimensional juxtapositions. The employ of subtlety in an otherwise overt genre is to ZATLAZ's credit.
In the series displayed, I Was, I Am, I Will Not Be ZATLAZ portrays in his last hurrah perhaps the most universal story of humanity. The themes of lust, love, betrayal and dejection; the introspection of the individual and the inquiry of the relevance or futility of interpersonal interaction. It is perhaps a simpler story at face value than any imagined him bookending his life with, but it is in fact a final act of thoughtful subtlety in a field of regrettably explicit pop art.
