REALITY SHOW

SOLO EXHIBITION BY ZEEHAN WAZED

PRESS RELEASE

REALITY SHOW | Solo Exhibition by ZEEHAN WAZED
PRIVATE PREVIEW: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 2019 | 7 – 9 PM
OPENING: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2019 | 7 – 9 PM
ON VIEW: THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 2019 – SUNDAY, MARCH 1, 2020

LOCATION: ABXY Lower East Side | 9 Clinton Street | New York, NY 10002
@zeehanwazed | @abxyles | abxy.co | Artsy

FOR ALL PRESS INQUIRIES PLEASE CONTACT STEPHANIE GOTCH

(New York, NY) ABXY is pleased to announce Reality Show a solo exhibition by ZEEHAN WAZED. Reality Show marks the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. It will be on view from November 14 – March 1, 2020. For this exhibition, Wazed presents new work in painting, sculpture, and creative new media, including a series of paintings activated by Augmented Reality.  

Like déjà vu through an Instagram filter, the works in this exhibition summon the suspicion we’ve seen them before in a dream (or was it on screen?) In each piece, Wazed blends fact and fiction, figuration and abstraction, fantasy and nightmare to create images that appear like snapshots of the contemporary subconscious. On this psychic battleground, hyper-realistic facts and figures sourced from digital news media burst, stretch, and tunnel through glowing tangles of geometric abstraction. Forest fires, warheads, walls, prescription pills, omnipotent eyeballs, creatures now extinct, robots, rubble and rising tides materialize out of rainbow reverie like involuntary hallucinations. What’s uncanny, in fact, is how much of this isn’t a dream. 

In Reality Show, the mercury rises as stakes surge to mythological proportion. Large scale paintings calligraphically connect disparate, yet familiar scenes within canvasses composed like tattooed tapestries. In works like “Hope Floats,” a colossal arm aims a loaded gun towards an innocent victim, while in miniature below an endangered whale rescues a sleeping child from deportation. By juxtaposing reality’s chilling likeness to nightmare with such an impossibly peaceful vision of an actual “Dreamer,” Wazed’s work effectively authenticates the dreadful absurdity of contemporary life. Here - recast in galactic dreamscape - images ripped from the headlines memorialize a world on fire and our resultant anxiety at once. Exposing our inner and outer realities as a contradiction in terms, the artist’s luminous, high-contrast visual language awakens our humanity from the dissociative lullaby of digital media and unmasks the communal isolation produced by its ambient interventions into contemporary life. In an age when the Internet weaves the emperors’ clothes and only the children cry out in disbelief, Wazed’s satirical brand of cyber surrealism reports that if we are collectively unconscious of anything today, it is each other.

Recurring motifs such as hands, eyes, worlds, and wormholes explore themes of individual and collective agency in the human experience at large. In works like “Dating App,” two impressionistically rendered robot hands - one black and one white - extend from opposite corners of the frame. Through vibrant swirls of spray paint and glossy, polychrome cubes in free fall, they reach towards a central, nearly life-like rose. Devoid any human figure, this scene of robotic romance implies a future of love that does not include us at all. By applying historically dissonant modes of painting to distinguish organic from technological matter, the artist symbolizes the mortal difference between emotional and artificial intelligence. As they attempt to connect, these programmed protagonists act out an innate desire for physical touch, but to what end? Unburdened by biology, the survival of our synthetic representation does not require our natural capacity for compassion. Revealing his subjects as hollow imitations of evolutionary tenderness, with “Dating App,” Wazed relates humanity’s unique emotional experience to our collective survival. In the paradoxical euphemism characteristic of Reality Show, the artist suggests and that as we slip from each other’s grasp, so too slips control of our common future.­

With this exhibition Wazed will also debut “Screen Grab,” the first live action Augmented Reality short film. A collaboration between the artist and filmmaker Ambrose Eng, “Screen Grab” stars actress Teresa Ting and tells the story of a nosy couple wandering into the gallery after hours. Shot on Alexa mini using vintage Zeiss lenses, the film was then embedded into a series of paintings within Reality Show. Using the ARTIVIVE app, by scanning a painting in this series with the gallery’s iPad, visitors will be able to unlock the film, which unfolds in two-minute clips across four separate canvasses. On screen, the paintings in “Screen Grab” will appear to come to life.

This exhibition will also include a series of small sculptures in the form hand-painted iPhones.

Read Artist’s Bio 

ARTIST STATEMENT | Reality Show

“I think what made me stand out as a dancer was the effort I make to blend different styles together. When I dance, I’m trying to move so fluidly, that transitions from one genre to another are almost imperceptible to the audience. From hip-hop to vogue to house to breakdancing – my goal is always to maintain that flow. That’s the same approach I bring to painting. The works in this show incorporate so many different styles and materials, each requiring a different application method, or brush, or drying time. So while I always start with a completely clear vision in my head of how I want the painting to turn out, I had to be extremely thoughtful as I applied layer upon layer of imagery to the works in this show.  

But I’m not just mixing different methods and mediums together for shock value (or to make my life harder) – of course, they each come with a specific set of aesthetic qualities that I’m looking for to express a particular idea, but by blending different styles and forms of expression, I’m also reflecting my approach to our world, and what I’m trying to say with each piece in this show. I believe it takes all kinds, so to speak. And just like us, each style brings its own history, advantages and disadvantages to the work, whether it’s calligraphy, graffiti, abstract art, impressionism, hyperrealism or anything else. For me, both the thrill and the challenge lies in conceiving of how they can all work together to create something almost utopian. A vision of what we could achieve together by discarding antiquated classifications and instead harnessing the power of our variant perspectives to create something bigger and more beautiful than any single element involved. 

The AR is such an exciting part of that for me. I feel that if a picture can say a thousand words, an augmented one can say a million. It works like this - in the show, I have a series of works called Screen Grab. And each of those four paintings has an augmented reality component, so when you hover over one of these pieces with the iPad, on the screen, the painting turns into a video.  The video is actually a short film (also called Screen Grab) that I made with my friend Ambrose Eng. It’s a narrative, live-action short about a nosy couple who wanders into the gallery after hours to take pictures for their Instagram stories. I won’t give it all away, but it’s the first time anyone has used live actors in an augmented reality application like this. And because this work will be presented in the gallery where we filmed it, it’s a pretty meta experience to see it at ABXY.”

- Zeehan Wazed, 2019

EXHIBITION ESSAY

by Emily Gallagher

 “I was free, but the city wasn’t,” Basquiat laments in the recently emerged, previously unfinished film Downtown 81. A young Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as a character much like himself– a graffiti artist and punk musician, trying to hustle a place to sleep in the punishing grind of eighties New York. Throughout Edo Bertoglio’s film, we follow the artist on long walks, touring a downtown that was as mangy as it was unrecognizable. The stakes of survival and neglect on those bygone streets felt so apparent, and yet there was Basquiat and his contemporaries, channeling a lack of resources into one of the most creatively chaotic periods the city has witnessed. I think about multimedia artist Zeehan Wazed’s similar resourcefulness transposed in this era. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, scrappiness demands going beyond the streets. Wazed is part of a new guard of working artists that live just as experimentally in digital space as in the city itself, utilizing emergent technology to expand their physical practices and narrative gravity to reflect our troubled times. 

The city is less free than ever, Wazed knowing this more than most. The artist immigrated to the States with his family at the age of three, settling in Jamaica, Queens. Though he attended Stuyvesant High School and then Baruch College, his education came from elsewhere and everywhere, as it does with city kids, especially riding the subway, which he did for long stretches to and from school. There, Wazed absorbed the subterranean graffiti, filling notebooks with inspired designs before eventually partaking in the elicit act himself for a short-lived period. By night, Wazed would be the first generation of teenagers to have access to Youtube, utilizing it’s free user-generated content to form synchronicity with strangers, who taught the artist his moves without the financial roadblock of traditional dance lessons. It’s the phenomena Natalie Bookchin explores in her film Mass Ornament (2009), named after a term to describe a popular dance during the thirties, involving rows of choreographed bodies moving together in perfect harmony. These dance line ups, Natalie Bookchin says, represented a “precise geometry, dynamism, and machine-like quality was seen by critics as the perfect expression of the age.” Perhaps the perfect expression of our age is Wazed– the Youtube dancer alone in his room, performing both a private act in a very public forum. Boldly, he did leave his room, becoming “one of those kids performing in the subway,” in the artist’s own words, and participating in dance battles in Union Square. With dance, the artist began as he does time and again, using digitally-sourced tools, weaving and feeding them back into physically-grounded mediums. 

When Wazed found that his graffiti practice was at odds with his legal status, he changed course. From the illicit wall murals of New York, the artist channeled his practice into canvas space, encouraged by childhood friends and painters Vernon O’Meally and Malik Roberts, who Wazed continues to have constant dialogue with via their shared studio space. Still, the transition into the fine art world is a tried, and not always true path for many graffiti artists. Work that appears revelatory in the streets has a way of becoming stale and gimmicky in gallery settings, especially when senselessly reproduced. Wazed was cognizant this shift meant a recalibration, but he embraced the challenge as a cerebral exercise in the tune of his perceptual psychology undergraduate studies. “I'm a big believer in synchronicity and alignment,” the artist says of that transitional time, “now I try to tell those sort of stories in my work directed by the momentum of how things connect, even when it seems otherwise farfetched, whether it’s visually or contextually.”

Though the moves and materials of graffiti were especially present in Wazed's first solo gallery show, Momentum– it would prove to be only one perceptual layer. Staged in ABXY gallery in 2018, the walls of Momentum were covered in large canvases with sweeping lines of black, gold and white. The palette came by osmosis to Wazed, through a day job working from a firm that handled luxury design. The artist wondered what would happen if these class-signifying colors were juxtaposed with the linework of graffiti and movement of hip-hop, expressions that could rely on self-directed exploration rather than economic access. The large abstract works did the thing that Lee Krasner’s masterpiece The Seasons does: you look at it, and you imagine the bodily movement required to make such a thing– the inhibition of movement that must have burst forth. Wazed even describes his process of making these works as “dancing with a can of spray paint,” in his artist statement for the show. This suggestion of Wazed's own body became reinforced through technological interventions– utilising burgeoning virtual reality technology, Wazed made an avatar of himself as a dancer, moving through the lines of the painting when a screen was held to the canvas surface. 

In Momentum, Wazed further dovetailed the relationship between dance, graffiti and technology by utilizing Google Blocks software to create designs that replicated his choreographed movements, that were then 3D printed. The resulting small gold sculptures, precious like ornaments on a tree, reflected complex shapes well beyond the dexterity of the human hand. These sculptures exemplify the kitchen sink quality of Wazed interfacing with technology, but also how the artist attempts to wield these innovations for social good. Recently, Wazed sold beta 3D printed sculptures, in exchange for donations to Save the Children. Wazed is constantly thinking of new ways to incorporate a philanthropic element to his practice– it’s the creative footwork of a dancer, of an immigrant, of someone constantly code-switching between cultures and now mediums, forging his own hybrid viewpoint. “I have a vision of what we can achieve together by disregarding antiquated classifications and instead harnessing the power of our variant perspectives to create something bigger and more beautiful than any single element involved,” Wazed says in a recent artists statement. 

On the occasion of Wazed's second painting show, we enter Reality Show, quite literally. Gone are the swirling patterns, the pleasing repetition of the black, white and gold paintings. Enter the world we live in now, frying up in a pan, as in one of the more direct works of the show, Sunny Side Up. Reality Show is largely a figure painting show, a radical departure for an artist who had never picked up a paint brush until making these works. The paintings are Wazed’s most accessible works yet, a conscious effort according to the artist: “I wanted the canvases to tell a direct story,” says the artist, “to add context to my work, because the non-figurative work felt too escapist at this moment.” The stories within the canvas should be largely familiar to the viewer, as Wazed figurations are largely pulled from imagery in the press– devastating source material like the photograph of a chain of school children being lead from the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in the United States, or children of the same age, working in diamond mines in the Central African Republic, from a recent Amnesty International report. “These images went viral for a moment and then they were gone, Wazed says, “I kept thinking about that in relation to time, how the events of these images still affect families, communities and lives in an ongoing way.” As with the advent of photography, Reality Show troubles the promises that emergent technology will heal the world’s ills. The mentality– ‘if we can see it, then we can fix it’– has largely not held up. In response, Wazed fluctuates between despair and meditation. In Modern Mythology, a pegasus figure symbolizes the failed fantasy that our technological advances will be the white horse to our salvation. In another quiet pocket of the painting Hope Floats, the haunting image of the Syrian boy washed up on the beach now lies on a whale, as if dreaming, seemingly being carried off into a less cruel world. 

The through-lines of Reality Show often leads to climate change– the crushing anxiety it produces and the weight of it’s amorphous, impending doom. It manifests ubiquitously in Reality Show’s cerebral landscape, as it does in our news alerts. Beyond the cacophonous canvases, Zeehan’s sculptural work crystallizes the speculative nature of our collective fear. With the work eyePhone, Wazed imagines the next generation of Google Glass. The miniature sculpture is shaped like an eyeball, conjuring a time when biotechnology allows us to upgrade from smart glasses to smart eyes, that can be popped in and out of our skulls like a Mr. Potato Head. Embedded on the surface of Wazed’s robotic eye is a hypothetical, if not imminent future, complete with an apple logo seal of approval. What is reflected in the all seeing eye is a hellscape: smoke wafts off the towers of civilization, fires rage, and sea levels rise. A drowning person reaches for a drone that floats just out of reach. The drone makes no gesture to save the drowner, and during a tour of the show, Wazed sardonically jokes that the drone is probably scanning the drowner for a bank account balance– seeing if the desperate person is really ‘worth saving.’ The gaping hole between technology’s potential to help us and passively live streaming of our downfall is regaled once again by Wazed, who asks the viewer in earnest, “what’s the point of omniscience if all we can see is a live stream of our collective self destruction?” 

Amidst the churning, Dali-esque chaos of Wazed figurative paintings and dense sculptural work, is a suite of paintings unlike the rest. Small in scale, simple in their color block design, the Screen Grab paintings are the Trojan horse of Reality Show. Rather than a quiet reprieve, each of the four paintings contains an augmented reality component carried over from Wazed’s last body of work. This time, the paintings become a portal to a live-action short film, written and directed by the artist, in collaboration with Ambrose Eng. In the film (also entitled Screen Grab), a young heterosexual couple wanders into ABXY gallery. The viewer begins a meta-experience of looking at art about actors looking at the same art the viewer is witnessing. The short film features actress Teresa Ting desperate for Instagram content, while her boyfriend, dopey and compliant, follows her around with a phone as she poses with Wazed’s paintings. Cue the skin-crawling feeling of watching strangers take selfies in public. It hurts because we all take selfies too. We want others to think we are interested in interesting things, and thus interesting ourselves. We post images of art in a gallery with the full complication of the human psyche. And yet, coming in at two minutes in duration, the Screen Grab film is Warholian in its superficiality. The way the couple communicates about posting to Instagram feels like an embarrassing joke, or the way boomers imagine gen Z communication. Just as Warhol’s avant-garde cinema often feels self-consciously fake with a cast of ‘superstars’ performing disaffected cool kids, Wazed’s characters are noticeably off-key in playing their role. It doesn’t feel natural, but it is a new normal. 

Satire aside, it reminds me of how language surrounding new things often lags outrageously behind the thing itself. Describing the experience of interfacing with social apps is barely developed yet, and existing language used thus far seems to fail us. Only through developing new ways of telling stories, does the way we understand our contemporary lived experience expand. I admire how Wazed desires to bear adequate witness to the way we live now through utilizing emergent mediums alongside historic ones. In this disorienting time in history, it seems redundant to have AR, a technology with explicit goals of adding more layers of information to our perception. Yet come it will, and all the better to have an artist with a social consciousness that wants to participate in steering these advancing technologies towards understanding our human experience as a tool of empathy rather than a weapon.