VALERIE ZARS

The STATIC
words from the artist

Research, Life as a Laboratory: My grandmother would share planting rituals that connected to the land lost to her during WWII. Always, ash with the seed potatoes, enforcing the generational chemistry of farming and pagan rituals that formed a picture of her past for me.

From nature walks, oozing tree saps, tiny fungus shoots and sparkling insect bodies found under fallen leaves. Days spent sheltered by the dappled light of the forest, stepping on balsam debris and smelling the scent like a distant language I'd thought I recognized. Cross-country skiing at night, lit only by the full moon and falling snow, the crystalline surface ahead, yet unmarked by anything other than velvety branch shadows.

Hearing Music in Silences. Never needing a marked path to follow: Learning how to sing by laying across my grandmother’s breast as she chanted traditional bourdons. Falling in love with cinema and photography in the stacks of vintage movie magazines secreted in the back of an aunt’s cavernous closet. The gentle color and smell of a lilac bush positioned so that the wind would push it against the house, releasing scent into an open window. Remembering the special tree planted by my great grandfather in what became her childhood yard, having pears, peaches, apples and plums growing out of the one main trunk, a product of his experiments with grafting, something he did in his spare time after his shifts at the Colt Armory where he fabricated gun barrels.

Noticing Everything is a Gift. Memories are essential Tools: Constructing cities from scraps of cardboard and food packaging with my grandfather who spoke very little, but all his tools were mine and he formed puzzle boxes out of found bits of wood so nothing was ever wasted. A folded scrap of paper containing a detailed drawing of the solution was always included. Once I found a small cardboard suitcase in his attic, the inside smelled sweet and looked waxy from something seeping into it. Someone had told them to pack prunes for the ocean journey from Sweden to avoid sea sickness. The case was no longer good for holding anything, except the story. The lumber yard, the hardware store, the drug store, the grocery aisle, hospitals and care homes, all places included in my material journey. I never had any doubt that I would make things. and those things might be art, and they might be useful only to me. My ‘materials list’ reads like a breadcrumb trail to my past and a lifetime of fascinations.

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I am never who I thought I was, but I recognize pieces of my memories in my work. I see the building blocks of my history, my ‘secret history’ - to name-check the title of one of the shows I was included in while in NYC.

My intentions are usually not laid bare but are woven in as a texture - literally / figuratively - through the layering of materials, texts colors, references fused by titles. In my art, the sound or feeling that resonated inside my life at a specific moment in time is suspended and made lucid, captured on a substrate. I never know what I will say. I only know how I will say it. Nothing I make is strictly for now, I keep adding on to the melody of its existence as part of a body of work and more will be plucked out of the harmonic ether. I am tuning-in to a constant stream, a gloriously relentless bombardment by information and trails of thought that only I control the volume of.

There are elements of synesthesia that I am constantly wrestling with. Focusing through repetitive motions, only then able to sort out the relentless flashes of light coruscating across the surface of the rushing waters of my concentration.

“ .we are asleep with compasses in our hands…” -W.S. Merwin from ‘The Estuary’ 1977