“If you’re always following the recipe, that’s as good as it’s ever going to taste.”
Zachary Diaz’s upcoming Stormwater show started with a ball of paper.
Years ago, Diaz wrote (and quickly discarded) an emotional letter to an ex, only to find the wadded paper months later. Capturing the words he had written on the page in a still life, Diaz hesitantly included the drawing of the letter in an earlier exhibition at Stormwater Studios.
Several people pointed out the piece to him in the show, and Diaz started to realize a point of connection. “If that’s one way that I can connect with total strangers, how many more ways can we connect with other people? What other experiences or memories or reflections do we have that coincide with how someone else has felt?” Diaz asks. From that moment, a residency was born.
Diaz’s residency at 701 Center for Contemporary Art expanded this idea of unsent letters by outsourcing writing. Participants wrote letters to people or experiences, which were published anonymously on Diaz’s website. Several were selected to be the subjects of drawings that will be featured in his upcoming exhibition, which shows at Stormwater Studios from October 8-17.
This show is a combination of work from this residency and an earlier show called Cloudwalker, both of which were partially released online due to the pandemic.
Cloudwalker features clouds, as its title suggests, birds, and varying figures hidden in the compositions. “I like creating narrative stories that the viewer can make up themselves… I sort of lay the groundwork — I give them all the accents— and they can kinda come up with their own imagination what’s really going on,” Diaz says. He likes making work that makes people think.
The Letters portion of the show is ongoing throughout the duration of the exhibition. Viewers will be invited to submit their own letters, all of which will culminate in an installation that will be featured in the show’s closing reception on October 17 from 6-8pm.
While Diaz is still conceptualizing how the installation will look, he plans on ordering the letters in a way that reflects their content, identifying themes such as love, forgiveness, and varying emotions.
Since starting the Letters project, Diaz says he’s become a lot more interested in how he feels when he’s making. His earlier creative process involved stricter planning and reference sketching. Now, Diaz works more intuitively, which, in turn, has made projects go faster and made him more aware of what he’s creating.
Diaz tends to mix mediums in nontraditional ways, layering oil paint over gessoed paper and drawing on top with charcoal. “I don’t think there’s any concrete way to create something” Diaz says. “If you’re always following the recipe, that’s as good as it’s ever going to taste.”
By making the letters in this show anonymous, Diaz says that he gives people a shield to really be honest. This openness displays his belief that so many experiences in life are shared, whether you know it or not.
Diaz describes the exhibition as a dive into his mind. “If you’re interested in learning more about everyone around you through the eyes of an artist, then come to the show,” Diaz says. “It’s a story in two parts… Cloudwalker is about how I see the world and everything around me. Letters is about how you see the world and learning more about the people around you.”
The opening reception for the exhibition is October 9 from 5-8pm. Whether by attending the show or submitting an anonymous letter yourself, Diaz wants to help create connections.
“Artists are gardeners. We make roses from the recycled parts of life,” Diaz says. To see how one crumpled piece of paper turned into a show, stop by Stormwater Studios before October 17.
- Stephanie Allen