July 25, Zach Bucek
MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER
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ZACH BUCEK @ PØST
1904 EAST SEVENTH PLACE
LOS ANGELES, CA. 90021
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For sudden Joys, like
Griefs, confound at first.
-Daniel
Defoe, from Robinson Crusoe
Once I had established
these things, I thought I had reached port; but when I set myself to reflect on
the union of the soul with the body, I seemed to be cast back again into the
open sea.
-Leibniz
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MYSTERIOUS TRAVELER
is a one night solo show by ZACH BUCEK, featuring paintings and drawings. TRAVELER takes as its premise the
castaway narrative. The castaway functions as both protagonist and author,
existing in a perpetual state of suspense, facing the pressures and
possibilities of a strange, uncertain environment. To contend with this
anxiety, the castaway attempts to impose an order upon the unknown. He makes
maps and calendars to master land and time, shelters to contain and protect,
tools to shape and transform raw material, vessels to explore or escape, and a
language to define and describe. However, these colonizing attempts are often
met with failure, as the inexorable forces of time and nature break down both
body and mind. The pictures in TRAVELER
present fragments and artifacts of these moments of rupture, displacement, and
transformation. The imaginative terrain of TRAVELER
has its origins in the daily activity of a transplant navigating the urban
archipelago of Southern California. Like the castaway, the artist must always
start from experience, their creations existing between work and life, between
the external world and a constantly compromised subjectivity.
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At places in the
central valley the vegetation rose shoulder-high. Several times he had fallen
over the stone walls and brickwork courses hidden beneath the grass, but he
picked himself up and doggedly pushed ahead. By now he ignored the nettles that
stung his legs through the torn fabric of his trousers, accepting these burning
weals in the same way that he accepted his own weariness. By doing so he found
he could concentrate on whatever task lay in front of him – the next painful
push through a nettle bank, a difficult step across a tilting flagstone. In
some way, this act of concentration proved that he could dominate the island.
-J.G.
Ballard, from Concrete Island
Perhaps as a way of
speaking of itself, literature – by insisting on shipwrecking on uncharted
islands that oppose their shores to the hostile void and reject the order of
the mainland – will keep doing what it always has done: opening up the
possibility of another life, away from this one.
-Hernán
Díaz, from A topical paradise
