Some Witches after Prison, 2020, Wax pastel on paper, 36 x 24 inches.
ZAZU SWISTEL
Artist Statement
My current work navigates the affliction of the mind when it is constrained by its own territorialized memory. These drawings demonstrate how the surrealist subconscious is always necessarily seen through the lenses of the conceptualized conscious-self.
I have a desire to portray the mesmerizing, but also painful claustrophobia that comes with being controlled by one’s perception as it moves through the corrupted external built environment. What results are often self-referential cages—translations of a bizarre phenomenology. While encountering memory’s abstracted objects, ideas quickly transform into a cathexis of slippery logics or rather, the more culturally constructed feshitisms. Color and skewed architectural perspectives are often devices of time—conflating the real and imagined to transcend and confuse physical space. I enjoy writing titles and digitally manipulating versions of my own work as forms of dirty and coercive humor—an ironic sensibility that I find soothing in a torturous world system.
As a trained architect, I am dictated by laws and codes but as an artist, I believe in subversion and perversion; decay and decadence; and the downfall of manmade development and the insurgency of the natural environment.
Zazu Swistel is the 2022-2021 recipient of the Emma Bee Bernstein Fellowship.