Zuriel Waters

April 22 - May 28th, 2023

“I created these pieces over the past 12 months or so. Not entirely sequentially, there are some gaps in between, although the work does tend to be made one after the other, not simultaneously. They are very related to their time of year. Like flowers I guess. Though they don’t wither and die in the winter, instead taking its crystal pallor and absorbing it through cephlapodic appendages. I want them to be just like the way a sound can be. Just before a sound becomes a word, before a sequence of notes becomes a melody. I want them to be peripheral, like something you can pass by that keeps you company but isn’t too demanding. They live in houses so it’s important that they be good roommates. ‘Ding Dawn’ means nothing really, maybe just like a door bell, but Dings are also Dingbats, like the houses and the font. Fun-functional. We also once curated a show at Sister called ‘Das Ding’ (The Thing) with Ben Dowell’s sludgy, muscle-y abstract painting suspended in a curved, angle-less space and lit frontally with a slow pulsating light… What else? There are almost two different bodies of work in this show, the burlap ones are newer, a little smaller, with no ‘torso’ squares, and the larger ones are a bit more leathery, a bit more celestial in palette too. I can never really decide if they are approaching full humanoid or not, though at this point they have legs really just as a consequence of their folding pattern (they fold into quartal sections). They are literally alive, as much as I can possibly make something living with just paint, thread and fabric. As much as something can be said to be alive that lives entirely in the symbolic dimension. Like the way that language can be imagined as a massive mushroom mycelial mat, updating itself anytime two people meet and share thoughts. That’s the kind of alive I mean. The work updates itself with every new piece, functioning to live on a wall somewhere, to enable more of itself’s to be made. Anyway…. It’s just so nice to be back in the cloudy dream town Los Osos and within the warm embraces of Nick and the karate dojo next door; faint exclamations that softly punctuate the sacral space (hyah!). The cube garden. Though less of a painting ‘gardener’ than maybe a bio-engineer I feel perfectly at home within the broader Left Field family of plant and landscape design related enterprises; what better a context for art than of other stationary, living, beings? Cacti... octopi….. Cactopus, ahhhh! maybe for the next one...”