Zachary Weber

Chicago based artist Zachary Weber harnesses materials to mine at sub-conscious curiosities. He employs diverse mediums from porcelain to spray-paint to articulate a resolve that questions the boundary of the physical and the two dimensionality.

Zachary is a merit scholarship recipient from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), BFA (2021). He has exhibited at Art Miami (2022), Zolla Lieberman Gallery (2024), The Art Center of Highland Park, IL (2022); University of Indiana Northwest (2024), and is collected by Frank Stella and Gentler Architecture amongst others.

Artist Q & A:

How do you choose the materials you work with, and what role do they play in shaping your creative process?

The materials I’ve chosen are familiar to me. Clay, for example, is one of the most familiar (if not–the most) to most people; we simply don’t bother to recognize it. Lumber and cloth are the same–often ignored for the project by which they facilitate. I want to shift the conversation of material value. Why is it that a painting can sell for millions of dollars when it alone is cloth, wood, and pigment? I’m curious about which combination of ‘material ingredient’ arrangement I am to use in order to engage my own interest. I believe I need to find comfort within the material, its limits and potential, in order to satisfy the work I am making.

Can you explain how your “Seedling” series challenges traditional interpretations of vessels and Utility?

I think there is a familiar consciousness connected with ‘the vessel’ whilst attributed to sphere-like objects made from clay. All I am doing is removing aspects of their structure and reintegrating them into/ onto/within itself. I am challenging its own ‘being’ in that sense; I ask what else can this become? And if people interpret that as a ‘challenge’ of ‘the vessel’ I am OK with that. Personally, now, I think it is limiting for me to believe there is as strong of a relationship between the Seedlings and said ‘traditional interpretations of vessels’. I am more engaged with wanting to remove any attachment to the familiar and simply letting the object ‘be’. I think at the root of it, at least in my practice, I am not ‘challenging’ anything. I can observe the way the material reacts when I move it, but that doesn’t ‘challenge’ the way it exists.

Follow the artist along: www.zweberart.com

Zachary is featured in the Winter 2024 edition of Art Seen, Issue 14.