Zachary Carlisle Davidson
Zachary Carlisle Davidson is a mixed-race man making mixed-media artwork with no mixed messages. Davidson's work has been exhibited and collected in various countries across North America, Europe and Asia. His 17+ years of art education and art-related occupations also pan across these continents.
Davidson received his BFA from The University of Oklahoma and his MFA from Indiana University. He currently teaches as a program manager for arts-based job-training and college prep for middle and high school students at Downtown Aurora Visual Arts.
Can you tell us a bit about the process of making your work?
I make simple compositions with drawing and collage every weekday (and some weekends) to better focus. A few days in a week, I dedicate some time to working on preliminary ideas for something I want to make, and failing to do that, I will draw an iteration for an idea I’ve already explored before to see if I can discover something new.
For bigger projects, I rush into it initially then pause around what could be considered halfway. Then, working on it in shorter clusters to completion really helps me be more contemplative about my intention for its direction.
What are you working on at the moment?
The way I’m working right now, more deliberately reflects how I’m trying to consider how my students’ isolation and less access to materials can lead to the informal spontaneity of small windows during leisure time. I mean this both as an art-educator lucky enough to be working in a pandemic, and as artist approaching concepts in the studio. And, regardless of media or scale, what I’m making lately are all rooted in metaphors around connection.
Recently, I took six of my top students to assist a local muralist with a large wall, and they had such a blast. So, now I’m designing a summer workshop that pairs socio-emotional learning for teenagers with local muralists who want to share their process with the kids that should take place in August.
Zachary Carlisle Davidson, Am I Still Not a Brother?. Plexiglass, screenprint, collage, and spraypaint.
Your prints are extremely textured and layered, which remind us a bit of your sculptural work. How do you go about achieving that materiality in your work and what does it signify?
Texture and layering are intertwined in my work to help me be inventive with depiction in both pictorial and non-representative works. In a romantic sense, it gives me feelings of animism. It’s the kind of stuff that draws me in when I see it elsewhere in others’ artwork, random things I see once and items I engage with on a more routine basis.
What are some references you draw upon in your work? Are there any themes in particular that you like to focus on when creating?
Even though it’s a cliché, so much of what got me into art comes from being a skate-rat and the lens that granted me to view space, interaction and time.
Much of my esoteric references are subject to semiotics tied to the Black Diaspora. Slice-of-life-narratives and imagery I choose are from my life, people I care about deeply or recent events. I care about sharing my multiracial experience, particularly my African heritage, in a reflective and sincere manner.
Being a father and educator has dealt me to consider how my work can be perceived by the next generation, so I think that makes me try to be somewhat didactic but also playful.
Zachary Carlisle Davidson, White Proximity. Gif.
Where are some of your favorite spaces that support contemporary art or design? Now that the art has an online presence has that changed?
I’m really impressed with arts non-profits that found new ways to provide for their communities during the pandemic.
Creative endeavors online that are centered around participation and engagement are interesting to me, but I don’t spend enough time to make specific recommendations.
Do you have any shows coming up? Anything else you would like to share?
I’ll be in some group exhibitions with the print co-op I’m affiliated with, Red Delicious Press, in the Denver metropolitan. And, I’m collaborating with my students on three social-distant safe interactive or immersive projects that will be shown in the gallery at my job.
Zachary Carlisle Davidson’s work is included in our show “Multitudes,” March 1st - April 30th. Visit his website or Instagram (@zlalclhl) to see more of his work.