Zach Nader

Lives and works in New York, NY

Artist statement

Zach Nader takes a kaleidoscopic approach to his practice, improvising structures to create rituals and friction around ideas of looking, memory, play, and home. His installations, photographic experiments, videos, and sculptures arise from the altering and interruption of photographic information through investigations into the feedback loop between images and our physical world. Treating all physical objects as a potential screen through which images may pour and stick, Nader reprograms them, creating sites that allow for a recalibration of vision and the networked image. Asking how an image can endure in this moment to tell stories, remain malleable yet sturdy, and engage with mystery, Nader generates systems that carry the marks of their making while resisting network assimilation. Through the exploration of familiar scenes—picnics, car advertisements, family play, and birthday parties—spaces are sought to break images open, run interference patterns, and assemble new stories from the fragments. This process compresses the distinctions between physical and digital mark-making, reflecting our contemporary experience of being both rooted physically and simultaneously scattered across a virtual globe.

Artwork