By Lawrence Miller

On Monday, the final day of November, artist Kevin Zucker delivered a talk to a half-filled Chase Auditorium, focusing on his past and current work and the ongoing timeline of his young career. The talk lasted about an hour and a half and involved Zucker explaining and elaborating on his prefabricated PowerPoint presentation of works. The audience was prompted to, and did, ask several questions of the artist regarding his work.

It was interesting to chronologically see samplings of Zucker’s work, ranging from his early undergraduate career to the present. Though relatively short, his career has visibly developed and snaked with his interests. Zucker’s work never loses sight of his earlier experimentalism, though the message and ideas behind his work have developed organically with his experience in the art world and his interest in public spaces.

The first works Zucker showed explored the relationship of objects to space. Zucker’s large objects, typically exceeding eight feet, are positioned relative to a “natural” grid, such as tiled floors or drop ceiling roofs. The perspective of the viewer is emphatically and overtly in the exact middle of the painted room.

To construct these paintings Zucker used a large-scale printer to transfer pre-rendered images onto a stretched canvas decked with wall paint. The method typically results in chip-sized imperfections, revealing the canvas underneath the 2-D objects and creating a “tension of the painting between the image and the object.” The object is methodically separated from the space in which it lies, but space and perspective become infused in the simple object (a chair, a piano, or a dance floor and disco ball).

From general interests in perspective and objects, Zucker’s work then began to pull from grid-constrained modernist architecture, buildings appearing as open spaces rather than autonomous objects. Drawing from spaces such as unadorned Protestant sanctuaries and large corporate lobbies, Zucker began to portray exaggeratedly large aristocratic sitting rooms. Small ornate chairs and moldings are dwarfed by the sheer size of the space in which they’re displayed.

The latest examples of his work were imaginary storage spaces that attempted to contain an inventory of objects that would be impossible to contain. These images reflect Zucker’s exposure to the section of the art world concerned with collection and consumption. Zucker realized that much of his work is in some collector’s storage space and envisions a massive impossible room reminiscent of the Smithsonian’s storage room in Raiders of the Lost Arc or Borges’ Library of Babel. He imagines objects of self-expression being thrown into a dark space of preservation absent of onlookers. Additionally, Zucker began to recognize the limitations of two dimensions and started playing around with architecture-based object creation software such as Google Sketch-Up.

In order to harness his interest in these ideas, Zucker began producing images of steel utility shelves with assortments two- and three-dimensional images on them. In many cases, the images were connected solely by a Google search word or a template inventory on a computer program, for example “sculpture” or “tragedy.” The result is a display that attempts to inventory the infinite; his array of storage shelves hang frame to frame like a materialized database. Zucker comes close to, comically and creatively, sculpturing the internet.

The artist, although only in his early 30s, has already accumulated a diverse and developed body of work. By showing us the everyday scenes that inspired his work and providing commentary on his methods, the presentation offered a detailed trajectory of Zucker’s ideas and intentions. Not only did the audience receive a glimpse of Zucker’s evolution of an artist but also saw the conditions and observations behind the content of his work.

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