Dim Zayan: ‘A Three-Quarter View of the Future’
Artist’s first solo exhibit engages questions about time, erosion, and human intervention.
Envisioning the future, we stare directly into the past. Zim Dayan’s debut solo exhibition, A Three-Quarter View of the Future, on view at Do Right Hall, presents a new collection of multimedia works—gypsum sheet layered with oil, acrylic, epoxy, and shellac—which engage the observer in questions about time, erosion, and human intervention.
The exhibition is curated by Jeanhee Yu. Yu and Zayan are co-founders of MarfaMUST (Marfa Untitled Studio Tour), an artist-led initiative that produces biannual sculpture gardens at Lannan Park and site-specific group exhibitions highlighting Marfa-based artists.
“Engaging both structure and surface, Zayan constructs layered compositions through iterative processes of pouring, staining, sanding and sealing,” writes Yu. By way of layering paint, epoxy and sanding techniques, the artist engages in a form of archaeology or excavation, alternating between adding material and removing it to create depth, history, and texture. The terrain-like compositions deploy earthen hues and raised contours to evoke topographical scenes shaped by erosion, rather than carved by hand. “The form emerges through excavation as much as construction, with each work retaining visible traces of process and material condition,” such as manufacturer markings.
The impetus behind A Three-Quarter View is “somewhat spiritual, or metaphysical at least. … If tomorrow we are gone and only the stones remain, erosion is the outstanding story. It will transcend us. It’s that form of communication I’m interested in … It is a humbling process,” Zayan says.
These new and ongoing works, in which he utilizes building materials from local hardware stores as well as power tools, such as an orbital sander and grinder, were initiated by meditative walks and conversations shared with the land, some revealing each gust of wind as a once-oceanic wave. Though interested in the conversation between cryptocurrency, finance, and art while living in New York and Connecticut (at a time when crypto “felt more promising or adaptive”), Zayan felt a strong pull to work with the natural elements once he arrived in Marfa.
Before living in the desert, Zayan spent time filming bodies of water, creating a whole “bank” of water’s movement, recalling that each one possessed an innate personality. Although he believes the artist’s role is to “absorb whatever the environment is willing to give you,” he maintains his interest in water’s elemental timelessness, a force that came long before us and will surely outlive us. Walking along the barren land with recorded sounds of waves reverberating in his ears, he gained a deeper understanding that this entire region was once a body of water. “It was as if these waves were talking to me through the landscape. There was this sudden compression of time and space … this blur between the wind, the sea, the landscape. In the sciences there is the Theory of Everything, where everything is bound by the same laws … You want to understand what binds things together.” In conceptualizing his new works, Zayan realized he was “doing a projection through time.”
While building materials may “seem unnoble,” as raw elements extracted from the earth, they have much to express. Early on, a desire to transform the ground for his paintings beget the shift from standard canvas to drywall sheet. Gypsum’s solidity produced a more tactile encounter with oil sticks—its inelastic nature allowed him to press with more force, forging a stronger, almost electric, connection between medium and surface. This developed into a greater curiosity about the material itself, and an interest in its ability to crumble and divest into organic, broken shapes in attempts to reveal the porous intricacies of material beneath its superficial face. For the most part, Zayan prefers to work with the “softer” or less durable backs of the gypsum sheets, as opposed to the fronts.
The title, A Three-quarter View of the Future, is borrowed from a vintage National Geographic magazine article, which Zayan found useful in encapsulating the sort of “sideways” looking required by the works, the observer’s glance oscillating between a direct front view and a side profile, resulting from the reliefs and curved contours that depart from a flat canvas.
“Whether you are looking at the sea or the dry land, there’s a place out there that, once all the humans and buildings are gone, you will have this barren soil,” Zayan says. “It is probably a vision of what would be there no matter what we do or how stupid we can be with our politics or choices as a civilization … Whether we save this planet or destroy it, it will outlive us.”
The opening of Dim Zayan: A Three-Quarter View of the Future will take place on Thursday, March 5, from 5 to 7 p.m. at Do Right Hall. The exhibition will be on view through March 15.