The Arts League is thrilled to announce Tacklebox, and exhibition featuring new works from Zach Hill along with a preview of Zach’s Crab Shack preview with work by Nick Moncy. On view in our gallery from February 11th – March 9th. An opening reception will be hosted on Saturday, February 11th from 6:00 PM – 8:30 PM.
Hill draws and sculpts works that play with visual perception and material identity. The new pieces in Tackle Box employ a logic of queer transmutation to actively perform masking, mimesis, and anthropomorphism.
Four drawings, mounted in shadow box frames of various depths, layer charcoal and colored pencil to carve out ambiguous images. These energetic fields of mark-making intertwine to imply the head of a horse, a face, or a figure. Informed by the phenomenon of multistable perception, each drawing can shift between multiple subjects depending on the perspective of the viewer. A two-part sculpture, Good Puppy, stages a pair of dog figurines on a pedestal. Facing away from each other with their butts perked into the air, each glances over its shoulder as if checking for their counterpart. One is clean while the other seems to have triumphantly emerged from a deep puddle of mud. A larger sculpture, Scopette, teeters over the others like a crane. This piece borrows motifs from weathervanes, Galileo thermometers, and compasses to create an imagined device for measurement or navigation. These flirtatious sculptures use gestures of looking and pointing to insinuate queer desire or recognition. Presented within Tackle Box is a miniature version of the artist’s curatorial project, Zach’s Crab Shack.
Zach Hill is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator working between sculpture, drawing, and moving image. He has been awarded the Mary L. Nohl Fellowship and Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship along with residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Bunker Projects, RAIR, Elsewhere Museum, and Stove Works. His work has been exhibited and screened at Haggerty Museum of Art, Frontera Garibaldi, High Tide, Peep Projects, Skylab Gallery, Comfort Station, VisArts, and Collar Works among other spaces. Hill holds a BFA from the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and is currently the Digital Arts & Sculpture Technician at Haverford College.
Zach’s Crab Shack:
anatonormativity
featuring Nick Moncy
Allergic to crab? TOO BAD! Zach’s Crab Shack is a queer contemporary art gallery hiding within the facade of a campy beach side crab stand. This 1/10th scale model of our future shack presents anatonormativity, a new video by Nick Moncy.
Nick Moncy was born in North Miami Beach, FL, now based in Philadelphia. A fusion of photography, video and performance, his multidisciplinary practice explores hybrid identity, the exclusiveness of nostalgia + capital for immigrants and marginalized groups, and the individual’s capacity to be moral. He disrupts any association of “expert” by allowing the subject to name itself, the human consciousness under structures of power.
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