Zach Stensen
Paint-by-numbers

Zachary Stensen is currently an assistant professor in the Painting Printmaking Department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar and Coordinator and Master Printer for the university’s visiting artist print publishing program, Fanoon: Center for Printmedia Research.

While at ´ace, he developed a Production Residency in which he explored the crafts and mechanised processes within printmaking and its capacity of multiple. Zach is interested in those devices like paint-by-numbers, which allow anybody to make a masterpiece only by following the same set of steps, and that at the same time, generate mistakes. He will explore this topic within printmaking.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Zach’s artistic practice encompasses printmaking, drawing, and artist books, as a means of self-referential exploration. While memory serves as the common backdrop, his work specifically recollects objects, places, family stories, and coming of age activities associated with my rural subculture boyhood. Using a distilled and quiet drawing language, he create iconic stand-ins for these objects, tales, and events, rather than accurate depictions. Poetic in nature, with subtle hints of humor and ambiguity, his work seeks to explore the grey area that exists between personal history and self-mythology.

In addition to his personal studio practice, Zach frequently works with his collaborative group, The Four- Footed Fellows Correspondence Club. Over the last ten years their group has developed a visual lexicon through drawing, installation, photography, and object-making, which at its root serves as an ongoing dialogue between members, while also chronicling the group history. Since the members are no longer anchored in a central location, reconvening often takes place in the context of a project or exhibition, and the subsequent work is imbued with a personal iconography that explores themes of wandering, wayfaring, travel, and history. Each project bears marks by every member, and no piece is ever considered complete. They are a living, breathing record of their own story.