Z'otz* Collective Exhibition Catalogue
Thames Art Gallery | Chatham ON
March 25–May, 2011
A Sleeping Beast Invoked,
Amorphously Shifting Its Shape
It is said that when
bats arrive in a new place, they form clusters.
This is a central premise for the members of Z'otz*, a Toronto-based art collective comprised of Nahúm Flores, Erik Jerezano and Ilyana Martínez,
three artists who initially united because of a shared heritage―all have Latin
American roots. Their figurative-based collaborative practice mixes
anthropomorphism, fable, humour and strangeness to produce works that are
totemic and filled with stylistic choices that emphasize play and gesture in
visceral, unexpected ways.
Z'otz* is a rare beast with an appropriately foreign name―that asterisk
is a small but important component of their collective definition of self, an
explanation truncated down to a glyph. The asterisk buzzes around the final z of the group moniker like an insect on
a hot summer's day, and it's meant to be noticed. Follow it, and begin a
journey that ultimately leads back to the historical pre-Columbian Maya
civilization and its rich world of symbols. Zotz, we learn, is the Mayan
word for bat, represented in Maya hieroglyphics as the stylized head of
a leaf-nosed bat.
The prominence of the bat in Latin American mythology makes it a potent,
dubious symbol, one that the collective strongly identifies with. Rich in
dualities, the bat was worshipped for both its dark and light qualities; Mayans
drew a very faint line between the concepts of good and evil, which were
regarded in totality rather than with marked separation. For this ancient
culture, bats were a symbol of dreaming, intuition and vision―of ideas taking
flight.
Working together since 2004, Z'otz* is as much a social experience for
its members as it is a creative endeavour, a way to unite, share time and
explore a sense of cultural oneness/otherness outside of the strictly
political―to creatively dream together. The Z'otz* artists meet weekly to
collaborate on mixed-media works that include drawing, painting, collage and,
more recently, ceramic and terra cotta sculpture. Every Sunday, the three
artists put aside their regular lives (and their solo art careers) and activate
a collective persona that is arguably more exotic than the sum of its parts.
Beneath the wild scratches of a pen or the stirrings of a brush, a sleeping
beast is aroused whenever the members of the collective come together. An
amorphous, unbounded six-armed being manifests in their studio as they play-and-work
as one, like the spirit of an old god invoked. Over countless work
sessions, this three-headed human/bat hybrid has been present in the ritual of
activity, and in that time, hundreds of collaborative works have taken form.
Returning time and time
again to the mythic, Z'otz* bend their collective concerns―ideas of
containment, displacement, evolution, transition―around a kind of intuitive,
hybridized form of storytelling. Their quirky collaborative images offer new
shapes to the world, free-floating compositions that accumulate over time.
Narrative links are made across each new work, and over the years, a definitive
Z'otz* worldview has taken shape.
There is a consistency
to their surrealistic visual wanderings, one that allows them to confidently
interact as a whole. Within the context of their practice, reality is given a
visceral skinning, and anthropomorphic motifs take centre stage. These are
tales with tails. God's creatures shudder and split; their mutant bodies dance
in peril or pleasure, cocooning through a variety of objects and forms. Teat
meets tooth, wheels spin, limbs move; anatomy sways and bends in the wind. The
shape-shifting beings that populate Z'otz* drawings, sculptures and murals
exist in a world where organic forms are also architectural structures.
Something is always being erected, other things coming apart.
In the Zotz*
Collective's studio environment, intuition is a driving force. Works are
started by one member and passed around, often making the rounds between each
artist several times over the course of many studio sessions. Circle upon
circle is completed, ideas intersect and overlap, and multiple drawings slowly
take their form. Wheels spin. A limb moves. A mark is made. Time is there to be
wasted, and all that matters is the continual looping of the in-progress
artworks around the room.
Members of the Z'otz*
Collective explore their world using materials as diverse as coloured pencil,
acrylics, inks, gouache, watercolour, clay, charcoal. These tools allow them to
collectively wander, to scribble and play games, to make mistakes. It's a
lighthearted and sometimes messy process with very few rules. Yet like a small
tribe, the collective has developed its own internal rhythms. They have
unspoken ways of setting a pace to their activities and determining importance
over excess. In guiding these abstract encounters towards conclusions that
work, they are clearly looking for a breaking down of the individual boundaries
that exist between them―a moment of fusion that announces a sense of completion
to each image. It is a negotiation that occurs over several work sessions, and
not every beginning leads to a satisfactory end point. Humorously, “roasted
chickens" is a Z'otz* inner-circle term for pieces that are deemed
overdone or unfixable, and these works are simply culled from the in-progress
pile. Zotz* keep only the best, and lose the rest.
For the works that
successfully pass through their playful collaborative ritual, a final process
of group naming takes place. Z'otz* titles tend to lean toward the poetic; in
their communal mouth, words take shape that tickle the imagination. These are
best seen as hints exposing possible tales contained within each work, but are
left open-ended enough to allow space for the viewer to invent his or her own
entry point.
When they exhibit, the
Z'otz* Collective present clusters of drawings and sculptures that offer a
range of views into their eclectic world―random samplings of their
collaborative activity, often with chronology made blurry. What matters is the
conversation between works, not the timeline by which they were executed.
Increasingly in their gallery scenarios, Z'otz*
are introducing large, direct-to-wall drawing installations, allowing them to
expand their scale and set up a more immersive environment. These murals
contain all the same allegory and ambiguity as their smaller works, and add
greatly to the fantastic totality of their exhibitions. The gallery becomes a
kind of metaphorical cavern―what
the Mayans might call Zotzihila, a great cave, the underworld where Zotz
dwells―where the bats are awake but still dreaming; and in this space, the
viewer can put on wings, join the flight and dream a little, too.
Mark
Laliberte (b. 1971) is an independent curator, project-based
hybrid media artist and experimental poet. He has exhibited and performed
extensively in galleries across Canada and the USA, He is the recipient of
several grants from the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council, an
Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and a Master of Fine Arts (2005) from the University of Guelph.
Laliberte lives and works in Toronto; he is a paid member of Bat Conservation International, whose
mission is to protect bats and their habitats worldwide.