| After many years of constructing and installing immense plywood structures with a range of imagery, Michael Zansky began to switch his focus to large optical installations, the largest of which was American Panopticon. Today, he is creating smaller tableaus in which a psychological drama unfolds through Fresnel lenses that bend and distort creating otherworldliness. Using his knowledge of film, set work, and art history, he now creates sculptural environments where the morphing of the actual objects is the driving force behind the content. Zansky also employs dramatic lighting effects and motion. |
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D. Dominick Lombardi
Michael Zansky, Red Shift, 2008. Mixed media (kinetic/lenses), size variable. Courtesy of the artist.
After many years of constructing and installing immense plywood structures with a range of imagery, Michael Zansky began to switch his focus to large optical installations, the largest of which was American Panopticon. Today, he is creating smaller tableaus in which a psychological drama unfolds through Fresnel lenses that bend and distort creating otherworldliness. Using his knowledge of film, set work, and art history, he now creates sculptural environments where the morphing of the actual objects is the driving force behind the content. Zansky also employs dramatic lighting effects and motion. The result of the combination of the distortion lenses with the revolving platforms and harsh lighting is further compounded by the viewer’s movements as they walk up to or past the installations. Every angle changes the focus of the lenses. This parallels the displacement of time, and the way in which the wishes of any culture distort their perception of history.
Zansky also “sets up” his scenes to both embrace and expose art history, with all of its flaws and foundations, to reanimate the dead, opening a door into a new world where iconic symbols toy with rationalizations. Literature, art, architecture, political science, cosmology, Voltaire and Bosch on the same stage with Moe of the Three Stooges all coalesce in vignettes that confound as much as they seduce.
In many ways, we, as a society, are devolving and Zansky is an astute observer. For his one-person, season-opening show at Nicholas Robinson Gallery titled The Western Lands, Zansky references William Burroughs’ pivotal work, the last of a trilogy that elucidates free-ranging thoughts about morality, death, reincarnation, the Pharaohs, and the Valley of the Kings. “‘Time flies like an arrow, fruit flys like a banana,’” Zansky, quoting Groucho Marx, states. “Perception is fleeting. My work reflects the battle of the concrete and the ephemeral. It’s a comical situation without end.
“The debris and minutiae of culture, the rejected culture as debris is fascinating to me. In my work, it’s about the ironic juxtapositions—and the tondo paintings as backgrounds for the installations places the drama in some weird historical context. The shadows too, take on an increasingly important role in its ongoing play between the actual and the shadow. It’s like Plato’s cave, where the characters watch and are fascinated by their own shadows.”
There are an infinite amount of levels of understanding, and Zansky addresses many of them. What are most important here are the depth of thinking and the weirdness of the thoughts. And it doesn’t always have to be something very specific. It could be a feeling, something vaguely familiar that eludes definition, but still manages to thrust your thoughts into the action. The periphery is as important as the strike zone in telling a story.
The last few lines in William Burroughs’ book, The Western Lands, iterates much about Zansky’s most recent perceptions: “In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling on the mountain. ‘Hurry up, please. It’s time.’”
