|
Contact Zack Stiglicz at SZpro@aol.com %%%%% Zack Stiglicz. Emerging Painter and Established Film/Video Artist. 708-952-0079 SZpro@aol.com GOOGLE: Zack Stiglicz or www.zackstiglicz.com ............................................................................ ............................................................................ UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS: **************************************** 1. Group Exhibition - positively reviewed - ChicagoFreePress.com - "The Man Show" - p. 13 - August 29, 2007 - reviewed by PAUL VARNELL. "The Man Show" Mars Gallery, Chicago August 18-31, 2007. **************************************** 2. Group Exhibition "The Cowboy and The Pegasus" At Pulaski Fieldhouse August 25, 2007. **************************************** 3. Group Exhibition (cancelled) "Untitled" September 8, 2007 at MCA Warehouse. (cancelled) September 9-30, 2007 Center on Halsted. (cancelled) **************************************** 4. To be announced: VIDEO/FILM SCREENINGS --- "posthumously yours" AND "gaz-zak: my face is pointed toward Napoleon" AND "Bent" (among the first-place awards: Black Maria Festival 2001; redux 2007) AND other videos/films by Zack Stiglicz. Selected works are now available for (free/educational) exhibition, by arrangement with Zack. Contact SZpro@aol.com ............................................................................ ............................................................................ %%%%% PAINTING AND FILM/VIDEO: Ive been a film and video artist for more than 2 decades. Recently, I have (re)invigorated my work as a painter, and Ive taken delight in teaching creative drawing-and-painting ideas-and-theories (RS1, RS2), as part of the new Curriculum in the First Year Program at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. %%%%% EVENTS in PAINTING: BAREWALLS Paint-In at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago - 140 juried SAIC alumni-painters painted in public (for 8+ hours) for corporate and individual sponsors, who offered closed bids for the work. All proceeds went to SAIC scholarship funds. Stigliczs piece (Woman in Barewall Doorway) was aunctioned off to Howard L. Ecker, President & CEO, JUPITER Reality Services. - November 2006. Sεnzε (Carnival of the Moon): Schizo-politico-analysis & Silver Daimon - paintings exhibited at High Concept Laboratories, Chicago. - October 2006. %%%%% WORK IN FILM and VIDEO: For the past twenty years, moving images have cradled my imagination. Since 1990 the films/videos have appeared in more than 200 festival and gallery screenings. The works: explore human perceptual limits; incorporate painterly compositions; radically cross-cut images; and imaginatively alter space and time. They also attend to the philosophical territory of absence-versus-presence in time-based art. %%%%% Video will connect itself with other art forms (e.g. multimedia exhibitions that will involve both painting and video), and re-appear as new moving-image works per se. %%%%% PUBLICATIONS and WORK-IN-PROGRESS MANUSCRIPT (details on request): %%%%% Published: Cinematograph, Lightstruck, Nexus, Millennium, South Asian Journal. %%%%% et.al. - Original, book-length, work-in-progress MANUSCRIPT, incorporating: %%%%%Drawings/ Collages/ Essays/ Criticism/ Fiction/ FilmText/ Poetry/ Mixed-Form-Work: %%%%%Castration Anxiety 101. %%%%%Animation by Larry Jordan. %%%%%Videos by Alan Sondheim. %%%%%The Ruins of Chichen Itza. %%%%%Andy Warhols Sleep and The Male Nude in Art. %%%%%Ingmar Bergmans Persona. %%%%%Fictional rendering of the life of Hiroshima survivor. %%%%%Shigeko Niimoto Sasamori. %%%%%Great Martyrs, Lost Prophets, and Mad Dogs (political allegory). %%%%%Four Black Men, Two White Women and A Baby (poetic & sociological reflections). %%%%%Black & White Aesthetics. %%%%%Coiled & Filial Seduction (experimental/ narrative/ diary/ adaptation FilmTexts). %%%%% PURSUIT OF PAINTING EXHIBITIONS: %%%%% School of The Art Institute of Chicago curricular change has created new mentoring options. While Ive continued to teach film aesthetics at Columbia College (Chicago), SAIC also has me mentoring aspiring painters and artists in many other areas. Film, painting, et. al. overlap and cross-fertilize. The results for my recent work in painting have been rich and rewarding. The artist is currently and strategically pursuing nation-wide and international exhibition options. %%%%% 180+ PAINTINGS COMPLETED (All are from 2006/2007)._____ (48x36 or 48x32 or 60x36, and painted on wood or canvas)._____ VISUALIZING THE (more-than-life-size) phantom of the HUMAN FORM._____ %%%%% MANY THEMATIC UMBRELLAS: Firstly, CRIMINALS. Theres no doubt in my mind that many of my images are imaginative, visual portraits of criminal beings (more on this issue, in a moment). My PAINTINGS (may) also MEAN MANY OTHER THINGS, which lends them to grouping and sub-grouping under MANY THEMATIC UMBRELLAS. THE PAINTINGS may REPRESENT: %%%%% Aspects of a self, forming various alliances, and varyingly at war with one another. Ghosts of the departed, via AIDS, cancer, accident, war, or an Unknown Scourge. Images of men who victimized my mother ( family rumor has it that I was the production of a rape). A random assortment of men (and women), whose spirits briefly touch, as they pass through some Ether of Being, The Bardo, Whatever. Disciples of The Antichrist ( too much melodrama?) A random assortment of Time Travelers, who serve inscrutable missions, the meaning of which may be unknown to themselves. Bodies that appear enigmatically in a dream, a fantasy, hallucination, or Other Unnamed State of Mind. Figures in search of a narrative ["150, 175, 200 (and counting) Paintings in Search of a Writer"]. Masks that cover The Void. Angels. Demons. Demigods. Gods. Saints. Sinners. Warlocks. (Wo)men, bonding: their appearances transformed by A Primeval Forest. (In)famous Imaginary Artists from The (In)famous Imaginary City from The (In)famous Imaginary Planet from (In)famous Imaginary Time. Several of the local artists, buyers, critics, geniuses and fools who will gather at my first NYC exhibition in Chelsea in 20??. (Dreamingngngngngngngng) Visions of Jack the Ripper. (Portraits of him and/or Images in his mind) Visions of The Buddha. (Portraits of him and/or Images in his mind) Visions of Friedrich Nietzsche. (Portraits of him and/or Images in his mind) Victims of a serial killer. Disguises of a serial killer. Adults - flying high - who have unwittingly consumed punch spiked with ACID at a Halloween Party for their kids. (The kids were spared, having been told to drink from a bowl that was just for them.) These images may be how the adult acid-heads appear to one another, or how they appear to me and you, as we evolve perceptual capabilities that shift our viewing pleasure to deranged-ranges of The Electromagnetic and Other Unnamed Spectra of "Higher" Dimensioned Existence. Mutants. Aliens. The Muse. Saturday Night & (Very, Very) Early Sunday Morning portraits of fellow fraternity brothers (Miami University of Ohio, sometime in 1975). The (Un)Dead the last inhabitants of a remote, ancient village-fortress: Theyve all been hungry, all been killed, and yet not a single one is dead. (Yannis Ritsos, writing in Romiosini the 1945 epic poem about the village of Monemvasia, Greece). Characters of a previously unknown manuscript by Kafka, strangely illustrated by an unknown artist named Crime Lord or "Demiurge" or "Great Hot Dada in The Sky with Diamonds." Characters of a previously unknown manu-digi-script by The Reincarnation of Kafka, strangely illustrated by an unknown artist named Crime Lord or "Demon-Monster-God Creator&Destroyer-Demiurge" or "Great Hot Penetrating Dada in The Sky with Diamonds." All of the above. None of the above. (Wo)men who died on the same battlefield. %%%%% Criminals. Theres no doubt in my mind that the images of these (wo)men are visualizations of criminal beings. They are other things as well: %%%%% Figures experienced by an unprecedented altered-state-of-mind. Men of widely differing origins, brought together by the grace(lessness) of (the) god(s), for reasons that are unexplained. Playthings of the gods. Gods of uncannily animated Playthings. Cosmic Puppeteers who rule the lives of others. Mental prosthetics. Men stranded on a desert island. Men stranded on a jungle island. A colony of vampires. A colony of the victims of vampires not necessarily new vamps, but slaves to the vamps. A colony of vampires with their slaves. A group of men connected by virtue (vice) of having given one another HIV, or some other Unknown Deficiency Syndrome. A group of men in a bathhouse (on the night of The Deadly Fire). Mythological figures, re-birthed from one another, Without-End (W.E.). Spirits. (Re)incarnations. Ur-Physical beings from a plane of existence "more physical" than our own fantastic, imaginary, everyday, "waking" universe. Men existing in parallel worlds, connected in mysterious fashion - just waiting for the science of humans to hypothesize and (tentatively) decipher the mystery. Fictional devices to spark the imagination. Renderings of our fellow humans made possible by "The New Science of Imaging." Random eruptions from the subconscious. The search is on for structured aspects behind so-called randomness. Characters in search of moving image media(tion). Unknowables (principled or poetic). Bridges to other people. (Quasi-abstract, quasi-figurative, neo-expressionist) Rorschach tests. (Inkblots with a human or almost-human face/body.) Mathematical geniuses. Artistic geniuses. (D)evolved beings. Beyond human being. Inside human being. Around human bring. Through human... Shape-shifting, physically cleaved-off, or otherwise duplicated and separated selves from one person. %%%%% Different personae/inhabitants (Ps) of a multiple personality psychotic (MPP) (or starter MPP). Each P is also an MPP, inside/unto itself. And each of those Ps is an MPP, ad infinitum. Each P in any MPP has a distinctive MO. MOs may change rarely (but radically) at particular breakpoints in time, making it very hard to know which personality is at fault for the commission of a crime. (This is all yet-to-be-understood - shall we use an offshot of "Catastrophe Theory" in mathematics to aid our model-building?)... Also, the MOs of different Ps in one person can converge or shift to become each other and increase confusion. Also, the MOs of Ps from different people can replace each other, or fuse, or otherwise couple. One could elaborate upon the complications endlessly. Any logical possibility should be open to our consideration. The starter MPP is also just one personality (one "P") in a larger MPP, etc. ... ad infinitum ... ad nauseum. %%%%% And finally, for now, the paintings visualize: %%%%% Men/women suffering from DISABILITIES. This will prove to be enormously significant, indeed as significant as the (imagined) facts regarding CRIMINALITY. %%%%% THESE (WO)MEN MAY MEAN MANY THINGS, all of which are products of our individual imaginations and shared, cultural/social/political symbolicrepertoire. What we have on our hands (in addition to blood) are desperate attempts to pin the tail in the dark - on the donkey, or whatever creature gets pinned these days. %%%%% I imagine these men to be real. It makes the painting so much more infused with significance. All paintings are from 2006 and 2007. %%%%% Painting resembles religious possession, criminal investigation, political expression, and sexual embodiment. %%%%% Daimons/demons multiply. %%%%% My studio/lab has filled with paintings. %%%%% A body of work has emerged with images of marginal, surreal, imagined, transformed, composite males - men in pain - men as pain. Ambivalence toward men created these paintings: marked, wounded, strangely adorned, deceptively muscular, phallus-compromised males. Sources?: Mens health zines, print/electro-media, creative anatomy, erotica, Picasso/Basquiat/Kahlo/Bacon, performance, political calamity, dance, the art of others, philosophy, and MOST WANTED profiles. The artist recreates these sources. %%%%% Strange marks fashion these painted dream-bodies, and magically redeem "the cosmic criminality" of The Waking Life. Distortion, abstraction, color fields and symbolic tattoos conjure away physical pain, disability, the troubled mind and cosmic crimes. Natures crime of chronic pain (my peripheral neuropathy) temporarily dissolves by means of the rendering-of-disability-into-art. A secret language between the artist and others-in-pain expands arts curative power. Channeling prevails. Personal issues become political / social/ poetic/ philosophical/ historical/ cosmic. Men of Interpol, Chasing Your Guernica, and Spy Camera Mania, Ethics and Consciousness hook-up as themes, and function as new projects for new paintings. %%%%% Joseph Campbells creative mythology dissolves boundaries between canvas/wood and flesh, fiction and history. Canvases and wooden planks double as shamanic cave walls and mug shots of prisoners as they struggle for radical transformation from monsters and beasts into tender beings. %%%%% Philosophically %%%%% Filmed images flee as criminals (with pleasure, hallucination, murder, and fantasy). %%%%% Painted images abide inside the law of embodiment and (what critics call) the quixotic quest for eternity (with longing, trance, revelation, and dreaming). %%%%% I see the difference, and sense intercourse, of film vis-ΰ-vis painting a bird of prey vis-ΰ-vis the refuge of a 1000-year old tree. %%%%% INTERPRETING IT ALL: %%%%% Picassos famous dove, the symbol of peace, was actually a pigeon (!) that he had painted some months before Aragon selected the marvelous lithograph, and declared it a dove and turned it into the poster of peace (Arianna Huffington). %%%%% Poor old Aragon, Picasso chuckled as soon as Aragon had left his studio. He doesnt know anything about pigeons. And as for the gentle dove, what a myth that is! Theres no crueller animal. I had some here and they pecked a poor little pigeon to death because they didnt like it. They pecked its eyes out, then pulled it to pieces. It was horrible. Hows that for a symbol of peace? the power of myth transformed the man at war with the universe into the man of peace and a cantankerous bird into the symbol of peace. %%%%% "THE CRIMINAL MIND" Interpretation of PAINTINGS by Zack Stiglicz - The title of a particular gallery-ready Painting Exhibition is: 'MEN & WOMEN OF INTERPOL: Crime, Rehab, Spirituality, Adornment, Disability, Mentoring, Muscles, Marks & Masks._____ 180+ PAINTINGS COMPLETED (All are from 2006/2007)._____ (48x36 or 48x32 or 60x36, and painted on wood or canvas)._____ VISUALIZING THE (more-than-life-size) phantom of the HUMAN FORM._____ %%%%% One may interpret my paintings as subjective (Third Eye, inner eye) visions of international criminals, as they undergo transformation in rehab and psychoanalysis. The "criminal mind" interpretation of the works views them as expressionist renderings of men and women from INTERPOL: MOST WANTED, as they (the men and women) boil in the cauldron of rehab, reform, and re-creation. This is a subjective (or psychoid) look at international thugs - as they appear to the minds eye. %%%%% My concern with the devastation wrought by the criminal mind began when I was 10. It was in Dayton, Ohio where I witnessed the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald live - on Network Television. You might say it was my childhood 9/11. Things would never be the same. The flip way of dealing with crime today playing MTV-style music or 60s Retro-Rock while watching multiple murders every night on Prime Time TV leaves me wanting, wanting more imaginative - more intensely subjective - ways of visualizing criminals. That is what these images of men are all about. They are, by necessity, abstracted, detached, and strange, and I hope ultimately revealing, richly enigmatic, or simply honest to my Muse. %%%%% In my imagination, all these painted men are inside me, inside others, and inside the strange territory between self-and-other where identity-boundaries give way. Theyre dangerous beings that have committed heinous crimes. All are imprisoned. %%%%% All are also undergoing various types of rehabilitation. Some are succeeding, as they achieve the amazing gift of spiritual transformation. Others continue to suffer from complexes, hallucinations, delusions, bipolarity, guilt, impotence, rage, sexual distress, political extremism, racial hatred, drug withdrawal, murderous impulses, and terrorist inclinations. Some live in a twilight world between deliverance and hell, between redemption and the regression-to-violence. %%%%% I imagine these men to be real. It makes the painting so much more infused with significance. All paintings are from 2006 and 2007. %%%%% Painting resembles criminal investigation. %%%%% Daimons/demons multiply. %%%%% My studio/lab has filled with paintings. %%%%% A body of work has emerged with images of marginal, surreal, imagined, transformed, composite males - men in pain - men as pain. Ambivalence toward men created these paintings: marked, wounded, strangely adorned, deceptively muscular, phallus-compromised males. Sources?: Mens health zines, print/electro-media, creative anatomy, erotica, Picasso/Basquiat/Kahlo/Bacon, performance, political calamity, dance, the art of others, philosophy, and MOST WANTED profiles. The artist recreates these sources. %%%%% Strange marks fashion these painted dream-bodies, and magically redeem The Other Criminal Bodies of The Waking Life. Distortion, abstraction, color fields and symbolic tattoos conjure away: physical pain, disability, the troubled mind and cosmic crimes. Natures crime of chronic pain (my peripheral neuropathy) temporarily dissolves by means of the rendering-of-disability-into-art. A secret language between the artist and others-in-pain expands arts curative power. Channeling prevails. Personal issues become political / social/ poetic/ philosophical/ historical/ cosmic. Men of Interpol, Chasing Your Guernica, and Spy Camera Mania, Ethics and Consciousness hook-up as themes, and function as new projects for new paintings. %%%%% Joseph Campbells creative mythology dissolves boundaries between canvas/wood and flesh, fiction and history. Canvases and wooden planks double as shamanic cave walls and mug shots of prisoners as they struggle for radical transformation from monsters and beasts into tender beings. %%%%% Philosophically %%%%% Filmed images flee as criminals (with pleasure, hallucination, murder, and fantasy). %%%%% Painted images abide inside the law of embodiment and (what critics call) the quixotic quest for eternity (with longing, trance, revelation, and dreaming). %%%%% I see the difference, and sense intercourse, of film vis-ΰ-vis painting a bird of prey vis-ΰ-vis the refuge of a 1000-year old tree. %%%%% Painting on Wood: %%%%% Most of my paintings are on canvas, but many of the paintings from 2006 and a few from 2007 are on lightweight wood panel. %%%%% The wood paintings are easily hung with frameless Swiss cord, corner supports, and a single nail. Others are available (as per arrangement) with traditional frames. %%%%% Wood offers swirl and crevice patterns that artists may integrate into the overall design of the image. Wood is also democratic (financially sensible). %%%%% Wood was also once a living thing, and that status is quite arguably philosophically, poetically and psychologically compelling. It is rustic, nostalgic, tender, vulnerable, and beautiful. Despite processing, wood panels allow us to acknowledge the use of found materials in art history. ("They" say that Basquiat painted on boards that he found in the alley). %%%%% The artist asks the viewer to be open to the rawness of wood backgrounds as a creative, aesthetic and material asset. The white slate (and high-production value) of a canvas offers its own aesthetic rationale a blank slate and a plentiful white void on which anything might unfold. Working with the swirls, patterns and brownness of wood, however, is like collaborating with a painting already composed by nature. %%%%% The lovely brownness of the wood coincides with my interest in respectfully and richly representing people of color. %%%%% Galleries and museums demonstrate the liberties in artists material choices: painting on wood, glass or metal, hanging without a visible frame, the use of unusual materials in assemblage thereby turning a painting into a 3d entity: these were vital options in innovative 20th Century Art. %%%%% The slight natural warp of some wood panels creates a modest concave or convex effect that adds physical and conceptual dimension to the material object. (This does not pose extreme difficulty in hanging.) %%%%% Wood bears the mark of time, and thereby sets up an intriguing tension between the quest-for-eternity that underpins any work of static art and the reminder via wood, once living that the material-world-is-flux. Wood also contradicts itself. It is uncanny. Once alive, it now abides as a non-living, spiritual foundation for the work of art. %%%%% Appreciating wood painting may require just a bit of encouragement. Presentation is key. When audiences hear about these striking advantages, the work of art opens itself to being a lived, valuable, and alternative experience. %%%%% Because Ive wanted so badly to paint, and because canvas simply costs too much ($3 for a wood panel, $30-60 for a comparably sized canvas), Ive occasionally embraced the democratic option of wood painting. I imagine that cave women and men were forest creatures as well - engaging in work, play, ritual, exploration, expression, embodiment, and things for which we will never (perhaps) have a name - painting the time away on trees (as a counterpoint to ritual birthing-and-painting in the great wombs of caves). The long-term results for wood were bound to be ephemeral (unless we were to find cave paintings which depict the early humans painting on trees), but the early humans probably created amazing testaments to the human imagination by marking bark on the Tree from which mythology would say they had collected forbidden fruit. (I say this with poetic and Gnostic principles at work.) %%%%% For those interested, the grim, grotesque, and uptown at last (NYT Review) painter Joe Coleman (Behold Eck/Mommy/Daddy) is one of the most noted of contemporary artists to work on wood. %%%%% E-mail me to say hello if, as a brave and caring soul, you happened to make it to this point in the artist's statement. I'd like to make your acquaintance, and return the favor of taking time to explore (your) art, this world and our shared (existential?/essentialist?/Whatever) "estate." %%%%% Thanks, Zack Stiglicz SZpro@aol.com
|
(F. Robert) 'ZACK' Stiglicz
Paintings: semi-abstract male & female figures
Evergreen Park Illinois
|
artspan is contemporary art