There’s a mall off the highway somewhere in Pennsylvania. If you drive to the back of the parking lot in the early morning, you’ll find a field blanketed in fog. On the opposite side stands a hunting blind, and I like to imagine someone sitting inside, watching me as I watch them.
Feeding on Forever. Open til Aug 1st by appointment. An exhibition by Zach Bowman, considers the paradox of memory–forever something to feed on but forever unsatiating. Returning to memory can be both healing and painful. Combining motifs of childhood and manhood, innocence and damage, Bowman finds new ways to build sculptural frames and elements around his photo practice to encase fragile memories.
Eight feet across, a single image of a resting fawn printed on aluminum is wrapped in a steel frame. The image is a resonant symbol for memory and feral innocence, informed specifically by Bowman’s memories growing up in Texas. It’s a type of self-portrait of the artist that can be a mirror to any viewer.
The show also features seven small aluminum images–a young buck’s coming-of-age story. They show a fawn with its mother, growing antlers, finding a mate, sparring a rival, etc. They are an optimistic and mundane chronology of images, classics like the “Stations of the Cross.”
In the center of the gallery is a nine-foot-tall functioning deer feeder. Twice a day, the feeder scatters grains of corn below. Throughout the exhibit, the mound of corn grows taller like sand from a timer on the gallery floor, like a Gonzalez-Torres installation eroding in reverse, with a similar sense of vulnerable tenderness and visual austerity.
The feeder is a common, ready-made object to the artist, who grew up around one on his family’s property, but it comes across as more unfamiliar and mystifying to most art viewers. The accumulation of grains reflects how, for better or worse, we compulsively return to the comfort of what once fed us, even as we know it slips away. The looming sculpture functions as a bizarre, indifferent mother-figure feeding a wild deer free to leave and return as the years pass.
The exhibition is a bittersweet meditation on what it is to feed on the forever fleeting.
“Ceremonial Contempt” 2025
10” x 4” x 7”
cold cast aluminum, polymer modified gypsum, steel hardware, Satya Nag Champa Palo Santo Incense Sticks
I’ve made these available on my site until next Friday, April 4th.
Link in bio
