ZACHARY FABRI
CUE Art Foundation 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001
ZACHARY FABRI Memory Foam
April 9—May 12, 2022 CUE Art Foundation Curator-Mentor AMERICAN ARTIST Essay by ZOË HOPKINS
Duppy_7, 2017-2022 Black and white gelatin silver print 9.25 x 14 inches
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ARTIST STATEMENT Zachary Fabri
My interdisciplinary practice interrogates lens-based media, language systems, and the built environment, often complicating boundaries around studio research, performance, and socially engaged practice. My work is primarily a conceptual engagement, with the idea dictating the material, digital or haptic. I am interested in experimenting with and deconstructing the binaries of the ephemeral and tangible, physical and metaphysical, political and poetic. By embracing themes that need to be unpacked, such as the intersection of race, class, religion, and popular culture, I aim to create critical discourse around issues of equity, representation, justice, and the dismantling of systemic oppression.
The nucleus of my research is a mindful practice of finding intimacy in the quotidian, creating wonder around all things large and small— whether in a Target store in East Harlem, in a museum in Budapest, or in my own backyard.
Context—whether a specific neighborhood or the architecture of a building—is a crucial factor that not only informs the work, but often becomes an active collaborator in determining its content and structure.
Originally commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, PA, the performance spanned two days and covered four miles of city terrain, utilizing over 30 public locations in high traffic
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In 2017, I created a multi-component project in Center City, Philadelphia consisting of performance, video, photography, an original music score, and a series of two-dimensional text works. Titled Mourning Stutter, the project is informed by the successive murders of Black people by police officers nationwide. The title posits that the black community is in a state of perpetual mourning due to the violence of policing within the larger structure of white supremacy.
Video still from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022 Single channel video with sound 9 minutes 30 seconds Ed. 1 of 3. 2 AP
main streets, desolate alley ways, and unseen alcoves. Following a predetermined route, my actions and gestures responded to and were choreographed by the architecture and urban design of each locale as I discovered unintentional spatial relationships between body and site. I am interested in the ways in which trauma is stored in the body—how it is remembered or forgotten— while remaining as a palimpsest of the psyche. Focusing on how life experiences choreograph the way we
move through space, I would like to disrupt memories of an oppressive past, and forge new psycho-spatial relationships to placemaking. Using body movement as my primary medium of expression, I seek to provide the space for abstraction to function as a means for liberatory contemplation. The work not only reclaims the freedom to access and hold public space without fear, but also asserts the necessity of imagining and experiencing joy freely in the public sphere. ◔
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ZACHARY FABRI is an interdisciplinary artist engaged in lens-based media, language systems, and public space, often complicating the boundaries of studio research and social practice. This context specificity often yields work that includes design, drawing, photography, video, and installation. Awards include The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize. Fabri’s work has been exhibited at Art in General, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, The Walker Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The Barnes Foundation, and Performa. He has collaborated on projects at the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Biennial, and Pace gallery. In 2021, he exhibited at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungary and completed a solo project at Recess Art in Brooklyn, NY. Fabri lives and works in Brooklyn.
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CURATOR-MENTOR STATEMENT American Artist
I won’t belabor the irony of being asked to mentor an artist who has mentored me. Zachary Fabri and I met years ago when he was an artist-in-residence at a studio where I am now in residence. At the time that we met, it was unclear to me how someone might be able to continue being an artist while having to maintain a full time job, and especially how to make this possible in a city like New York. Zachary energized me towards this possibility, and in this way he mentored me by providing a pathway. Zachary’s ability to represent continuation in pursuit of his artmaking is not just about art or about work, but about a type of activity that is mythologized in his practice. Through years of presencing his self through photographs of mute gestures, I’ve seen his ability to perform optimistic possibility. He embodies this activity in his studio and anywhere he might go. Set in the streets of Philadelphia, Fabri’s Mourning Stutter is language for an unspoken series of feelings. I use the word “language” loosely,
Duppy_8, 2017-2022 Black and white gelatin silver print 9.25 x 14 inches
because in fact, there is no vocal articulation in the exhibition. The only words offered are those in a silk chiffon text piece, quoted from the bard Toni Morrison: “ME AND YOU WE GOT MORE YESTERDAY THAN ANYBODY WE NEED SOME KIND OF TOMORROW.” Fabri has channeled, through movement and somber portraiture, the experience of waking up in a repeated scene for the last two years. As I navigated the coarse redundancy of my own quarantine, I knew life would be slightly smaller for a while. Unable to travel—or to come in contact with loved ones whose wellness I was uncertain of—I recognized this fact, but was reluctant to admit how the contagion had us all defeated. Amidst this slow recursive thread, more names were contributed to the track of Black folks that have become victims of police crime. George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Andre Hill, Manuel Ellis, Breonna Taylor, Atatiana Jefferson, among others. In the wake of a compounded sense of defeat, Fabri performs the feeling of getting up with the small breath you have remaining. Of being knocked back down. But getting up. Again. In mourning. Stuttering. Fabri shows us this possibility, and makes a life for us around it. ◑ 13
AMERICAN ARTIST makes thought experiments that mine the history of technology, race, and knowledge production, beginning with their legal name change in 2013. Their artwork primarily takes the form of sculpture, software, and video. Artist is a 2022 Creative Capital and United States Artists grantee, and a recipient of the 2021 LACMA Art & Tech Lab Grant. They have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art; MoMA PS1; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Kunsthalle Basel (Switzerland); and Nam June Paik Center, Seoul. They have had solo museum exhibitions at the Queens Museum in New York and the Museum of the African Diaspora in California. Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, and Huffington Post. Artist is a part-time faculty member at Parsons, NYU and UCLA and a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation.
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S-OUR AIR, 2021 Chiffon silk, black hematite stone 120 x 58 inches Installation view at Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY A similar chiffon text piece is included in Fabri’s exhibit at CUE. Quoting Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the new text piece reads “ME AND YOU WE GOT MORE YESTERDAY THAN ANYBODY WE NEED SOME KIND OF TOMORROW.”
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Duppy, 2017-2022 Black and white gelatin silver prints 9.25 x 14 inches each
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Video stills from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022 Single channel video with sound, 9 minutes 30 seconds Ed. 1 of 3. 2 AP
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BELOVED GESTURES Zoë Hopkins
“I need to find a place to be the air is heavy I am not dead” —Toni Morrison, Beloved1 To tell American history is to tell a ghost story. And to speak of the American present is to speak of a landscape haunted by the afterlives of violence, from slavery to sharecropping to Jim Crow laws. Perhaps no author has better understood this than Toni Morrison, whose neo-slave narrative Beloved (1987) is animated by ghosts, in particular the malevolent spirit of a child who was killed by her then enslaved mother, Sethe, to free her from the horrors of plantation life. Aching with these painful memories, Beloved offers testimony to the reality that for Black people, living is an experience of encountering, remembering, and listening to the dead. When I visited multi-disciplinary artist Zachary Fabri’s studio in December of 2021, Morrison’s novel lay alone on a shelf, perched in dignified solitude like a monument on its plinth. For Fabri, Beloved is not only a powerful negotiation of what it means to reckon with the memory of slavery, but it is also an aesthetic beacon of the inscrutable 24
grammars of Black mourning and resistance. Fabri’s current exhibition at the CUE Art Foundation is in many ways a meditation on the text and the themes that ignite its pages. The show, titled Memory Foam, brings together video work, photography, and sculpture from 2017 to the present, and takes stock of what it means to mourn an event “when the event has yet to end,” as theorist Saidiya Hartman writes in her essay “The Time of Slavery” (2002).2 Foregrounding his own body as a site at which to unravel this seemingly unanswerable question, Fabri’s works are provoked by the psychic and corporeal tangles of haunted life. They are dense with the labor of remembrance, of living among afterlives. Fabri’s video Mourning Stutter (20172022) sits as the show’s centerpiece. The piece follows the artist on a circuitous journey through the streets of Philadelphia, in which Fabri was followed by a group of live spectators and a cameraman. Shot in black and white, Fabri’s photographs infuse the city streets with the texture of collective memory. Throughout the video, Fabri activates several predetermined locations including alleyways, street
corners, and ledges with a series of intensely vulnerable, but simultaneously cryptic performances. Fabri selected these sites—most of which are noticeably off the beaten path—by deferring to an intuitive sense of how his body might interact with the space, more specifically how his body might resist it. Each encounter is difficult, even contrived. We catch Fabri crouching underneath bike racks or balancing on a curved rod, arms akimbo to maintain uprightness. Movement is cut with tension and struggle as Fabri oscillates between speed and slowness, bold action and quiet gesture. As viewers, we not only bear witness to the difficulty of Fabri’s performances, but we also become ensnared in it. The activations evade the ease of interpretation, fleeing from the hard edges of determined meaning. They are articulated through a vocabulary of abstraction that refuses to grant the viewer unfettered access to the Black body and its
infinite significations. Like memory, the performances refuse transparency. Like grief, they require work. Each action, each fraught encounter between body and space, thus becomes a ritual in mourning. The object of Fabri’s mourning is too heavy, too historically massive and complex to be limited to any one place or time: Yes, he is mourning those dead from the violence of white supremacy, but he is also mourning the precarity of his own living body as it moves through an urban landscape in which Black bodies are surveilled, policed, and killed. (As of the time of writing this essay, there are at least four unresolved cases involving a police officer fatally shooting a Black man in Philadelphia.)3 As Fabri dances, runs, and writhes in the streets of Philadelphia, he moves with ghosts, Video still from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022 Single channel video with sound
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within a temporal continuum wherein the contemporary urban landscape is shot through with an old, familiar violence that recurs over and over again. As Morrison writes, “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay.”4
aesthetic presence: the color red is borrowed not only from its associations with violence and passion, but also from a decisive scene in the novel in which the ghost-child announces herself in “a pool of red and undulating light.”5
Like Morrison’s novel, in which scenes of remembrance are layered into the fabric of the present, the rhythms of Fabri’s video resound with a chaotically recursive temporality. Though the performance itself was a durational project that Fabri recorded over the course of a day, the video is only eight minutes long: condensed, spliced, and rearranged into a non-linear unfolding. This disjointed narrative structure takes sonic form as the sound accompanying the video oscillates between a nondiegetic score and the urban sounds of the Philadelphia cityscape. Throughout the video, random flashes of red further disrupt and disjoint the timeline of the video. Here Beloved becomes a direct
For Fabri, a disordered, indeterminate sense of time is vital to an aesthetic representation of Black ontology. It refers to the uncontrollably and impossibly repetitive reality of Black mourning, which is so full of bends, folds, and asymmetries; it is a practice of recollecting the past and the things we have since forgotten, the act of “rememory,” as Morrison calls it. The unremitting pace of anti-Black violence takes sculptural form in The Memory Foam of George Floyd (2022), a work that bears the imprint of George Floyd’s body.
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Video stills from Mourning Stutter, 2017-2022 Single channel video with sound
Fabri approximated the shape Floyd would leave behind on a memory foam after determining the measurements of his body using research based in court and medical documents related to Floyd’s murder and the trial of officer Derek Chauvin—archives that are heavy with their own brutality. Unlike normal memory foam, Fabri’s sculpture does not return to its original shape: the memory of Floyd’s body assumes permanent form. It is a monumental statement of presence. But Floyd’s corporeality is of course indexed in what is not there. Loss becomes materiality as negative space is both laden with the weight of absence and filled with the ache of memory. Re-memory also animates Duppy (2017-2022), a series of photographs in which Fabri pictures himself as a sort of phantom. To create the series, Fabri revisited a number of the locations
where he performed in Mourning Stutter, and captured himself in chance moments of suspension, movement, and stillness. The photographs have a unique hushed attention to minor details in the urban landscape, to the neglected registers of space that feel eerie in their quietude. In turn, Fabri’s body and its surrounding landscapes emerge as sites of quiet haunting. Fabri’s return to these urban sites is itself a gesture of re-memory, of going back to architectures that are haunting his creative imagination. Fabri haunts these spaces in return. The nooks, glassy facades, and fenced in lots pictured in Duppy are uncannily still, fixed above time, but the evanescent blur of Fabri’s figure cuts through the silence of the landscape, sometimes like a shout and sometimes like a whisper. In three of these photographs, the artist’s body is not included in the frame, leaving behind
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noiseless architectural facades that are haunted with the memory of his body. In turn, we register Fabri’s figure as a fleeting, spectral absence: While Fabri himself eludes the moment of capture, the surrounding architecture echoes with his fugitive presence as it lingers outside the frame. The transience of Fabri’s presence makes Blackness legible as a site of recalcitrant fugitivity, but also of precarity. Duppy and Mourning Stutter reverberate with corporeal anxiety and vulnerability. Fabri’s body affects an intensely fraught relationship to the spaces he is meeting, assuming unlikely positions that eschew any pretense of regularity. He negotiates space in a decisively, defiantly performative manner: Balancing on the tip of a rock, randomly hiding in and reemerging from enclosed spaces, or walking at furiously agitated pace. At times he seems resolutely sure of his movements, and at others, they wither with hesitancy and trepidation. His movements are awkward 28
and restless—a helpless stutter. These discomfiting confrontations between body and world are touched with the tension of the unknown, born of a world in which Blackness is viciously denied certainty of existence. Fabri’s exaggerated, bewildering movements reveal Blackness as a condition of moving through space with a heightened awareness of one’s own body and the certain-but-uncertain atmosphere of anti-Black violence that it is shrouded in. It is a condition in which, forced to constantly anticipate this vulnerability, one must also anticipate mourning. But Fabri does not position himself as trapped within grief. Though he moves within it, he also dances to escape from it. Rather than enabling the cityscape to curtail his body, he seizes our conventional ideas of how to interact with public space and obliterates them, delighting in strange and unexpected ways in which the body can free itself. While his performances call attention to the relentless regulation of Black
bodies in what we call public space, in moving so insistently outside of normative expectations of the body, he also performs a kind of Black movement that is abundant, uncontainable, and unconcerned with anything beyond its own freedom. In Duppy, Fabri dons a silk garment that catches and suspends itself in the air, expanding his presence across space and time. This same errant and transient material adorns the walls at CUE in a new sculpture titled We Need Some Kind of Tomorrow (2022). The title, which appears in bold lettering on the silk itself, is borrowed directly from the penultimate page of Beloved, a moment that is ablaze with the tender reflections and aspirations of Morrison’s characters. Like Morrison, Fabri insists that Black futures are not only possible but necessary. And so I’ll end by letting the words resound once more. “We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”6 ●
Duppy_12A, 12, and 13, 2017-2022 Black and white gelatin silver prints 9.25 x 14 inches each 1. Toni Morrison. 2004. Beloved. Vol. 1st Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage. pp. 251. 2. Hartman, Saidiya. 2002. “The Time of Slavery.” The South Atlantic Quarterly 101 (4): pp. 758 3. Moselle, Aaron. “4 Black Men Killed by Philly Police and the Officers Who Haven’t Yet Faced a Jury.” WHYY. WHYY, April 22, 2021. https://whyy.org/ articles/4-black-men-killed-by-phillypolice-and-the-officers-who-havent-yetfaced-a-jury/. 4. Morrison, Beloved, pp. 43. 5. Morrison, Beloved, pp. 9. 6. Morrison, Beloved. pp. 323.
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ZOË HOPKINS is a writer originally from New York City. She currently lives between New York and Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she studies Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University. Her writing and criticism have appeared in Artforum International Magazine, Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, and other publications. Mentor TERENCE TROUILLOT is senior editor of frieze. He lives in Brooklyn, New York. This text was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with art critic mentors appointed by AICA to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
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CUE connects practicing artists and arts workers to essential resources and community. We exhibit new work, provide mentorship to under-recognized and underrepresented artists, build platforms to exchange ideas, create the context to develop peer-to-peer relationships, and educate a diverse next generation of artists. Exhibiting artists are selected through one of two methods: nomination by an established artist or selection via our annual Open Call. In line with CUE’s commitment to providing substantive professional development opportunities, curators and Open Call panelists also serve as mentors to the exhibiting artists, providing support throughout the process of developing their exhibition. We are honored to work with American Artist as the Curator-Mentor to Zachary Fabri.
STAFF
Jinny Khanduja Executive Director
Georgie Payne Programs Manager
Beatrice Wolert-Weese Deputy Director
Wendy Cohen Programs Associate
Cara Erdman Development Associate
Gillian Carver Programs & Comms. Associate
CUE Art Foundation | cueartfoundation.org 137 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001 31
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Amanda Adams-Louis Theodore S. Berger Kate Buchanan Marcy Cohen Blake Horn Thomas K.Y. Hsu Steffani Jemison
John S. Kiely Vivian Kuan Aliza Nisenbaum Kyle Sheahen Lilly Wei Gregory Amenoff, Emeritus
ADVISORY COUNCIL
Polly Apfelbaum Katie Cercone Lynn Crawford Ian Cooper Michelle Grabner Eleanor Heartney Trenton Doyle Hancock
Pablo Helguera Paddy Johnson Deborah Kass Sharon Lockhart Juan Sánchez Andrea Zittel Irving Sandler (in memoriam)
CUE Art Foundation’s programs are made possible with the generous support of foundations, government agencies, corporations, and individuals including: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Aon PLC Chubb Compass Group Management LLC DataSite ING Financial Services Merrill Corporation The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc. The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation William Talbott Hillman Foundation New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts
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Cover: Duppy 4, 2017 Black and white gelatin silver print, 11 x 14 inches All artwork © Zachary Fabri Catalogue design by Wendy Cohen and Joshua Hauth
CUE Art Foundation 137 West 25th Street New York, NY 10001
