Cursed
Brooklyn's Nick Z. gets real.
visual art
;)
(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION) |
When Nick Zaremba attended his ex-girlfriend's sister's wedding, he was stuck sitting at the kiddie table. Which was funny. Not because he hates kids — he doesn't, although they bore him — but because they were all "so psyched on drawing." And Zaremba, as anyone planning to check out his "Poking a Hornet's Nest" show at Art Star can tell you, is also psyched on drawing. So while the kids snatched at crayons fanned out like tiny rainbows, and the adults danced and drank and got depressed, Zaremba grabbed some scratch paper and started drawing. Garfield first, and then a Xerox-realistic Bart Simpson. The kids dropped their jaws. "They were, like, seeing magic!" he laughs. "They were so about it."
These are the moments that shape artists forever. They're also the moments critics don't take into account when standing before a piece of art, contemplating its depth, its meaning, its resonance, and ultimately its market value — as determined by a clusterfuck of canonized aesthetics. Sound like a bunch of high-art gobbledygook? It is.
"They only focus on the end, rather than the means," says Zaremba, aka Nick Z. of the gallery circuit. "My work is just a product of how I'm living — my relationships with people. The means are me over-thinking, like, every social interaction, me being anxious all the time. But, at the same time, not at all. You know what I'm sayin'?"
Not really. But that's OK. Inked on Zaremba's forearms are two tattoos: One reads "Gift" and the other "Curse." He explains: "Every time I feel good about something, I constantly start searching for the most negative thing about it. Then I obsess on that."
A self-described "Guido" from Beantown, Zaremba moved to Brooklyn a year and a half ago. While working as a handler at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, he struck up conversation with Kai Althoff, a German contemporary he imagined might be "as weirded out by high art" as he was. The two bonded and eventually collaborated on the recent "We Are Better Friends For It" show at Chelsea's Gladstone Gallery. The reviews were mixed. Village Voice pinged Z. for an "over-reliance on clichéd street art hipsterism." Time Out New York described the show as "very now" but Zaremba as "having a Jean-Michel Basquiat-meets-Paul-McCartney vibe, minus either artist's powerful narrative punch." Roberta Smith's review in The New York Times was positively ebullient.
If real is in the means, art is all around us. Zaremba's neighborhood in Bushwick is poor but welcoming, an endless source of inspiration, of kiddie-table moments. Junkers blast Mexican radio. Children chase one another around roaring hydrants. Old men, socks pulled to their waists, tremble as they walk.
Inside his naked apartment, we get another glimpse of real, that which inspires the end: A single mattress, no boxspring. Friends drinking booze out of pink plastic cups and kitchen curtains freckled with country ducks. (He loves them, he says, because they remind him of his mom.) Above the doorway: A Peter and the Wolf record narrated by Boris Karloff. Unfinished pieces hang on the walls around his apartment — he works on them when the mood strikes. "These," he says, motioning to two relatively empty canvases, "are my breakfast-time, wake-up drawings. Especially when I'm feeling good, watering the plant, listening to music and the sun is shining."
Stacks of art journals litter the floor of his closet. A scribble in one asks, "If art is a document of a moment in time, what is to stop this from being art?" On some pages, notes are jotted and then smothered with opaque correction fluid. I'm searching for a meaning that Zaremba can't give me.
"Maybe I just really love Wite-Out," he smirks, pausing to blow a sill full of cigarette ashes out the open window. He shrugs. "My subconscious is an animal."
Poking a Hornet's Nest opens Sat., June 23, 5-8 p.m., Art Star Gallery & Boutique, 1030 N. Second St., Unit 301, 215-238-1557, www.artstarphilly.com.
Also In This Week's Arts Section
Comments
Be the first to comment on this article.