Say What You See

ZACH STORM
September 9th through October 9th

A conversation with Zach Storm inevitably veers toward literature. Real books. Bound paper, slathered with words printed in ink, seem always to be on his mind. And this consummate reader’s love of syntax correlates directly to his love of pigments, inks and paints. In his world, a “line” is literary and visual, at once. And the specific speed of that line, in either realm, is essential. Zach reads slowly, deliberately, so that his experience of a story is immersive. The same goes for his drawings and paintings, whose abstract narratives smolder, rather than unfold. His method of creating the work is akin to a real time rehearsal of our experience of seeing the work. In the end, everything is quiet. This entanglement between, ink-line and sentence, between saying and seeing, is best illustrated by the preamble to Zach’s artist’s statement; it’s an excerpt from Don DeLillo’s Zero K: “True wind blowing now, garden unstirred, the eerie stillness of flowers, grass and leaves that resist the perceptible rush of air. But the scene is not blandly static. There is tone and color, shimmer everywhere, sun beginning to sink, trees alight in the span of waning day.”