See Line Gallery presents Zachary Stadel’s first solo exhibition
Heat and Dust. Stadel’s practice addresses the categorical boundaries between sculpture and drawing, sculpture and architectural models, and painting and printing. The works presented in Heat and Dust are part of a larger series that investigate the defining characteristics of boundaries between painting and sculpture.
Zachary Stadel’s choices of materials are familiar: canvas, wood, paint, but the forms they take gesture toward the undefined. Stadel collects bits of dried paint, canvas from previous works and saves unused paint from the studio where he works as an artist’s assistant, and incorporates these materials into his work. His amorphous collections of canvas and wood are covered in painterly strokes, their mass developed through long, patient accretion.
Stadel has developed a practice of making work based on a reinterpretation of Kristeva’s theory of the abject. Using the abject not as a subject but as a method, to extend the categories that we might use to understand sculpture or painting. Creating ambiguity by exchanging the characteristics of one medium with another delays immediate recognition and understanding. Expectations are waylaid and cognitive divisions are breached, affecting what Kristeva described as the “uncertainty of structure and the uncertainty of identity.”
Zachary Stadel graduated from the Art Center College of Design MFA program in the fall of 2004, where he studied under a Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellowship. He has exhibited in several group shows, including the recent Darkness and Light at the Armory Northwest in Pasadena. Stadel has shown in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Hong Kong, and Los Angeles.