Kitchen Talk 12
zack rafuls
“My practice is centered around the exchange between image, material, and gesture, taking form primarily as dimensional wallreliefs collectively intended to be read both as components in poetic rhythm and chapters in a cryptic narrative.”
Introduce yourself, list three things we need to know about you or your practice.
I currently live in Queens NYC, where I also have a studio I share with my partner, artist Tristan Higginbotham, and our beagle Kylee. Three things to know about me are some early accolades: winning the 5th grade Spelling Bee at Jack D. Gordon Elementary School (only to lose in the first round of the regional competition), being awarded "Most Improved" at the Jane Forman Tennis Academy Summer Camp (after weeks earlier biting another camper) and voted “Best Hair” as a highschool senior at Chattanooga Center for Creative Arts (my head is now mostly shaved).
What’s your creative process?
I take play seriously- my process is driven intuitively, seeking out combinations of gathered images and responsive gestures that unlock new potentials and meanings in each. I am always collecting from my environment, actively looking for catalysts for the next sets of aesthetic puzzles I set up for myself. I have a difficult time these days starting something from nothing- everything initially starts from something outside of itself. The works on paper happen mostly compulsively while the objects and reliefs happen with a different degree of patience and slow time.What factors have influenced your creation?
Lately, Sci-fi novels of the 60s and 70s (Delaney, Dick, Leguin) and the music of Alice Coltrane. Lots of walks where I do lots of looking. That time/space in bed where I’m half awake/half asleep.
What’s your main medium, how does your medum govern your artistic practice?
I would say my primary medium is collage, in the expanded and extended sense, as I see even my reliefs and objects as the products of a collage attitude/philosophy. Within and beyond paper, I'm interested in all the potentials, strengths, and capabilities various painting, drawing, transference, and photographic mediums have. They all serve different ideas uniquely, and I’m always exploring what they have to offer in shifting combinations. The idea usually comes first, and then I seek out the appropriate medium to express that idea.
How do you see the relationship between life and work?
What’s been on your mind lately?
In capable hands / incapable hands
Black tree over red sky
Home of bones
Sleeping knight dreaming
Pure fool
Empty day dawns again
Perfectly enormous
Sweepings
Considered inconsiderate
Golden shovels dig brown dirt
Bread of pompeii
Time to play b-sides
Gingham guillotine
The shape of seven scents
You-shaped hole
City slicker syndrome
Demons in dreamland
Monster of the week
Eyes ears and nose
How’s life outside of studio?
Every day I read on the train to and from work. I’m allowing myself to enjoy some degree of stability and evenness without considering myself a boring person after a passage of trials and troubles. Right now I’m happy it’s fall. It’s my favorite season and it always makes me think about the past and the future.
Share one favorite item of yours.
An educational model of the human brain I inherited from my dad. He was a neuropsychiatrist and a painter. The brain separates into its two hemispheres down the middle, and the sections inside are annotated by hand. As a kid, I always used to take it apart and play with it in his office.
Plans for the future?
Considering grad school. Planning a trip to Mexico for next summer for an old friend's wedding. Self publishing a book of my late father’s paintings.
What do you most desire?
Sustainability in the balance between my practice and life. To rid my mind of worry. To make art that is great but humble.
And finally, how do you like your eggs?
I like them every way, except as a salad.
Zack Rafuls (b. 1992, Miami FL) is an artist based in Queens, New York. He received his BFA from Watkins College of Art in 2015and has exhibited throughout New York, Tennessee, and Milwaukee.