19
OCT

Virtual Art Show: Adaption - Oct. 19 – 30

Enjoy Artist Zachary Buchner's Virtual Show: Adaption from Oct. 19  – 30 at lccc.wy.edu/virtualart.

Zachary Buchner is an artist and educator who lives and works in Chicago IL. He is also the director of the artist-centered exhibition space PRACTISE.

Utilizing both additive and subtractive processes, soft and rigid plastics, Buchner’s current work references the shallow illusionism, backlit glow and overlapping layers of our omnipresent digital field. Replacing the open browser windows, guides and grids of our shared digital lives with physical materials, his work reminds the viewer through frontality, reflection and scale, of our own bodies. Building on personal experience his work navigates a world of disruptive combinations: reflection and absorption, identity and its artificial construction.

Buchner’s research into the complex relationships between materials and experience focus on the prevalent use and symbolic possibilities of plastic. This research also reflects a decades long fascination with Color Field painting, the Light and Space artists and the structures of Neo Geo. He seeks to extend these historic visual and material languages by focusing on their relationship to contemporary technology, notably the flatness and vastness of the screens in our world, but also through their respective histories with plastic. Paint became plastic in the 60’s, was parodied as plastic in the 80’s and now painting happens in increasingly more virtual and synthetic ways. For Buchner, the ontological qualities of his works are not unlike the experiences of our relationships to others, our current sense of touch, or even our connections to bio-metrics and drugs. It is this dematerialization and dispersion of both painting and experience that his works attempts to represent.