Zackary Drucker

Artist’s Statement

Infusing elements of photography, video, text and performance, my work is rooted in cultivating and investigating under-recognized aspects of transgender history, locating myself in the history, and communicating my contemporary experience of gender and sexuality. Drawing from feminist and queer theoretical discourse, I address sexual exploitation, transgender representation, drag performance and explore relationships that facilitate queer/countercultural lineage.

With self-awareness and agency, my work reinvents and redistributes relationships of spectacle-spectator, domesticated-exoticized, dominator-subjugated. My performances incriminate the viewer, aiming to challenge conventions of entertainment and drag performance, as well as existing art historical representations of queer people.

I engage and reactivate historical queer vernacular, a coded language of resistance that is often times illegible and cryptic to an unfamiliarized audience. Locating myself both behind and in front of the lens, I inhabit the palatable, and often vacated aesthetic sensibility of drag, replacing the formulaic lip-synching routine with subversive language; I seek to destabilize both the drag-puppet and the voyeur, in an effort to humanize these reductive representations and simultaneously challenge their modes of misinterpretation.

My work provides a place to construct myself. I revisit erased histories, perform and inhabit multiple roles and narratives, and document moments of, and in between, gender scripting a narrative that is inherently self-reflexive as it is constructed, deconstructed and experienced.

Website: zackarydrucker.com

Biography

Select Solo Exhibitions

2007
Master’s thesis
D300 gallery, Valencia, Calif.

Select Group Exhibitions

2009
My Bloody Valentine, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles
A Trip Down (False)Memory Lane, Lexington Club/Silverman Gallery, San Francisco

2008
The Moving Index, Art Office for Film and Video, Los Angeles
100><100, LA> Summer Guests, Acuna-Hansen Gallery, Los Angeles

2007
Photo Miami, Steven Cohen Gallery, Miami
The Girly Show, Wignall Museum, Chaffey College, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif.
Greater Los Angeles MFA, CSU Long Beach, Long Beach, Calif.

2006
25 Bold Moves Brave, New World House of Campari, Los Angeles
Spaced Out, Rudolph Schindler’s Mackey Apartments, Los Angeles
Artstar Exhibition, Deitch Projects, New York

2005
Face and Figure, Westport Art Center, Westport, Conn.
One Man Show, Cooper Union’s Great Hall Gallery, New York
Mentors, Visual Arts Gallery, New York

Select Performances and Special Projects

2009
Resonate/Obliterate I.E., Sweeney Gallery/UC Riverside, Riverside, Calif.

2008
Kyky Love, Bitches Rule Cycle 2 & WILDNESS, Los Angeles
5-Minute Make-up Contest, Kreilling and Dodd, Los Angeles
The Horror…, PRAXIS Mojave, Joshua Tree, Calif.

2007
Some Assembly Required, Cal Arts, Valencia, Calif.
The Queens Panel, Cal Arts, Valencia, Calif.
Night of the Living Dolls, UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

2006
Decoration And You, Hollywood, Calif.
This River is Our Parade, Valencia, Calif.
White Lies, Cal Arts, Valencia, Calif.

2005
Artstar, Deitch Projects in collaboration with Gallery HD, New York
Forced-Feminization, Soho Grand hotel in collaboration with “Artstar,” New York
Art Parade, Deitch Projects, New York

Professional Experience

2008
Gallery assistant, Fahey Klein Gallery, Los Angeles
Studio, technical, and administrative assistant, Kaucyila Brooke, Los Angeles

2005-2007
Clerk, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, Calif.

2004-2005
Production and editorial intern, Artforum, New York

2003
Studio Intern, Mike and Doug Starn Studio, New York
Studio Assistant, Simen Johan, New York

EDUCATION

M.F.A., 2007
California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, Calif.

B.F.A., 2005
School of Visual Arts, New York

Residency
August 2008
PRAXIS Mojave, Joshua Tree, Calif.