Zachary Fabri: Memory Foam. Mentored by American Artist

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Zachary Fabri

My interdisciplinary practice interrogates lens-based media, language systems, and the built environment, often complicating boundaries around studio research, performance, and socially engaged practice. My work is primarily a conceptual engagement, with the idea dictating the material, digital or haptic. I am interested in experimenting with and deconstructing the binaries of the ephemeral and tangible, physical and metaphysical, political and poetic. By embracing themes that need to be unpacked, such as the intersection of race, class, religion, and popular culture, I aim to create critical discourse around issues of equity, representation, justice, and the dismantling of systemic oppression.

Context—whether a specific neighborhood or the architecture of a building—is a crucial factor that not only informs the work, but often becomes an active collaborator in determining its content and structure.

The nucleus of my research is a mindful practice of finding intimacy in the quotidian, creating wonder around all things large and small— whether in a Target store in East Harlem, in a museum in Budapest, or in my own backyard.

In 2017, I created a multi-component project in Center City, Philadelphia consisting of performance, video, photography, an original music score, and a series of two-dimensional text works. Titled Mourning Stutter, the project is informed by the successive murders of Black people by police officers nationwide. The title posits that the black community is in a state of perpetual mourning due to the violence of policing within the larger structure of white supremacy.

Originally commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, PA, the performance spanned two days and covered four miles of city terrain, utilizing over 30 public locations in high traffic main streets, desolate alley ways, and unseen alcoves. Following a predetermined route, my actions and gestures responded to and were choreographed by the architecture and urban design of each locale as I discovered unintentional spatial relationships between body and site.

I am interested in the ways in which trauma is stored in the body—how it is remembered or forgotten— while remaining as a palimpsest of the psyche. Focusing on how life experiences choreograph the way we move through space, I would like to disrupt memories of an oppressive past, and forge new psycho-spatial relationships to placemaking. Using body movement as my primary medium of expression, I seek to provide the space for abstraction to function as a means for liberatory contemplation. The work not only reclaims the freedom to access and hold public space without fear, but also asserts the necessity of imagining and experiencing joy freely in the public sphere. ◔

ZACHARY FABRI is an interdisciplinary artist engaged in lens-based media, language systems, and public space, often complicating the boundaries of studio research and social practice. This context specificity often yields work that includes design, drawing, photography, video, and installation. Awards include The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize. Fabri’s work has been exhibited at Art in General, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, The Walker Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The Barnes Foundation, and Performa. He has collaborated on projects at the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Biennial, and Pace gallery. In 2021, he exhibited at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungary and completed a solo project at Recess Art in Brooklyn, NY. Fabri lives and works in Brooklyn.

CURATOR-MENTOR STATEMENT

American Artist

I won’t belabor the irony of being asked to mentor an artist who has mentored me. Zachary Fabri and I met years ago when he was an artist-in-residence at a studio where I am now in residence. At the time that we met, it was unclear to me how someone might be able to continue being an artist while having to maintain a full time job, and especially how to make this possible in a city like New York. Zachary energized me towards this possibility, and in this way he mentored me by providing a pathway. Zachary’s ability to represent continuation in pursuit of his artmaking is not just about art or about work, but about a type of activity that is mythologized in his practice. Through years of presencing his self through photographs of mute gestures, I’ve seen his ability to perform optimistic possibility. He embodies this activity in his studio and anywhere he might go.

Set in the streets of Philadelphia, Fabri’s Mourning Stutter is language for an unspoken series of feelings. I use the word “language” loosely, because in fact, there is no vocal articulation in the exhibition. The only words offered are those in a silk chiffon text piece, quoted from the bard Toni Morrison: “ME AND YOU WE GOT MORE YESTERDAY THAN ANYBODY WE NEED SOME KIND OF TOMORROW.” Fabri has channeled, through movement and somber portraiture, the experience of waking up in a repeated scene for the last two years. As I navigated the coarse redundancy of my own quarantine, I knew life would be slightly smaller for a while. Unable to travel—or to come in contact with loved ones whose wellness I was uncertain of—I recognized this fact, but was reluctant to admit how the contagion had us all defeated.

Amidst this slow recursive thread, more names were contributed to the track of Black folks that have become victims of police crime. George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Andre Hill, Manuel Ellis, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, among others. In the wake of a compounded sense of defeat, Fabri performs the feeling of getting up with the small breath you have remaining. Of being knocked back down. But getting up. Again. In mourning. Stuttering. Fabri shows us this possibility, and makes a life for us around it. ◑

AMERICAN ARTIST makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video. Artist is a 2022 Creative Capital and United States Artists grantee, and a recipient of the 2021 LACMA Art & Tech Lab Grant. They have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA PS1; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland); and Nam June Paik Center, Seoul. They have had solo museum exhibitions at the Queens Museum in New York and the Museum of the African Diaspora in California. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Huffington Post. Artist is a part-time faculty member at Parsons, NYU and UCLA and a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation.