CICA Museum, M Gallery
November 8 – 12, 2023
2023.11.08 – 12
Saturdays
Saturdays is a animation on how to cook pancakes. If you follow closely, this video includes a recipe. That’s 1.5 cups flour, 1 tbsp baking soda, 2 tbsp sugar, 1/2 stick butter, 1 egg, 1.75 cups milk. The video is about the act of prepping, cooking, and serving food to the people that I love.
I have a strong spiritual relationship with food. In my family, we express everything through what we cook. We ascribe to…for every human emotion there is a meal. So, there’s food for loss-Edible Arrangements and there’s food for birth-bagels with the works. I’m the chef (short order cook) in our house, and so part of the way that I express love is through food. Pancakes on Saturdays are statements. They are my way of saying “yes” “I love you” “I would do anything for you.”
I made this animation by hand painting each component in acrylic on hot press watercolor paper. Then I photographed each part and digitally deleted the negative space. In Adobe Premiere I used key frames to set video parameters and rates of change. For example, the image could be at ninety degrees at 4:00, then at one hundred and eighty degrees at 4:10. That would indicate that the picture would rotate ninety degrees over ten seconds. If that makes sense, then start to imagine the same process repeated for position, scale, perspective, color, value, opacity, etc…It’s a lot, I know.
The sounds in this video are all recorded noises from my kitchen. Drawers thud. Forks clank. Plates clink. If I was a better musician, I would have set up my kitchen like a drum set and hammered out the rhythm. But, I can’t really keep time like that. So I cut sound chunks with standardized lengths. I used these building blocks to construct visual patters to match audible beats. I wish I were a better drummer.
In Saturdays time is both progressing and repeating. There is a clear order to the recipe but an atemporal looping experience to the ritual. Pancakes are my family’s weekly markers of Saturday mornings. They are also one of my spiritual touchstones, if you’re into that kind of thing. My fantasy of heaven, which probably ain’t happening, is a big long outdoor table filled with home cooking and surrounded by my people. I hope that Saturdays inspires a more metaphysical conversation about family, memory, and the humble act of preparing a meal for a loved one.
Zach received his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his MFA from Boston University.
He has exhibited in multiple museum exhibitions, such as the Maine Maritime Museum, the Museum of Work & Culture, the American Labor Museum, the UMaine Museum of Art, the Commonwealth Museum, the Art Complex Museum, the Gibson House Museum, the Attleboro Arts Museum, the Alexandria Museum of Art, the Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park and Museum, the Reece Museum, the Bennington Museum, the University of Southern Mississippi Museum of Art, and the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art. He has shown with numerous galleries and academic institutions throughout the United States (and in Ireland). He is the recipient of grants from the Blanche E. Colman Trust, the Puffin Foundation, the UMass Boston Labor Resource Center, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and The Awesome Foundation.
Zach is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts with his wife and three ebullient sons.
