Zach Moser's Professional Web Presence
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Artist Statement
My artistic practice is the facilitation of collaborative investigations, as well as interactive installations that attempt to uncover shared human values and inspire dynamic readings of our surroundings. By focusing on collaboration and interaction, I allow my work to explore the unknown in order to create new discussions, discover new methods of communication, and propose new expectations of human potential.
I place my work within an art context for many reasons, the foremost is that I am interested in participating in a field focused on discussion of aesthetic values as well as identifying how current cultural definitions are created. By putting my work within traditions of the interactive and site specific work of Joseph Beuys, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mel Chin, David Hammond and Andrea Zittel, I am able to create work where I am a participant in a democratic process of articulating cultural values. By positioning collaborative and interactive processes that address issues of consequence and connect to a wide audience, values express themselves through new interactive and creative communities.
These interests dictate that my work situates itself in a variety of unlikely venues -- civic events, low income neighborhoods, dying industries -- and then allows the work to overlap with a diverse set of other fields such as public service, sociology, philosophy, engineering and education. But the work does not simply occupy these sites and address these fields, it helps to define them.
Education:
Lamar High School
1994-1998
I.B. Diploma
Houston, Texas
Oberlin College
1998-2002
B.A. Studio Art
Oberlin, Ohio
Long Term Works
Big Parade 2001-2003
The Big Parade was an experiment in the power of our human need to express ourselves as well as in the effectiveness of decentralized organizing theory. The premise was to facilitate a parade that allowed an open forum for individuals and organizations to represent themselves in anyway that they saw fit. In the end hundreds of people participated in the parade and the following festival. I organized the parade for two years, as well as facilitated numerous community workshops. The parade has continued for five years and become an Oberlin, Ohio tradition.
Workshop Houston 2003-
With my collaborators, I founded Workshop Houston with a hypothesis that given the opportunity kids will empower themselves to succeed. By providing the space and skills that excite youth to learn on their own terms, we give them the confidence and options they need to make positive decisions for themselves. Currently, Workshop Houston runs the Third Ward Bike Shop, and a Teen Program, which includes the Beat Shop, the Chopper Shop, and the Style Shop.
Shrimp Boat Project 2005-
My current project is the creation of a multi-faceted collaborative artist project, the Shrimp Boat Project. This project is inspired by an interest in dealing with the panoply of current issues relating to or accessible from the Gulf of Mexico and a belief that approaching these issues from the platform of a Shrimp Boat, will provide us with unparalleled insight into the region as well as into the processes of art making.
We envision the Shrimp Boat to perform two separate but very related roles: as a platform, vehicle or conduit for artists, writers and musicians to participate in a physical and metaphoric journey through the Gulf of Mexico; and as an active participant in a living landscape and regional economy, a site that is at once embedded with contradictions, turmoil, destruction and potential.
Using the Shrimp Boat as a platform to approach this site connects the project to the landscape and its people. Indeed, we intend to go beyond simply documenting this America; we will be participating and working in this America by working with the landscape as shrimpers under the guidance of a seasoned Shrimp Boat captain. From this, the project is situated between work and culture, it functions on the belief that by being grounded in a place of consequence the artworks to be created will have added relevance as well as improved access to a diverse range of issues.
Installations
Flee the Flood, 2003, Delray Beach Cultural Loop, and Delray Beach, Florida
Interactive Installation Commissioned for the Loop. It consisted of a café table that could ridden around the loop while three people talked or played card games.
Untitled Fun 1, 2004, Project Row Houses Cultural Arts Festival, Houston, Texas
It was a trampoline buried in earth with a mat of grass mat sewn over it. Anyone was allowed to experience it how they saw fit.
Liberty Wholesale 2005, Thought Crimes: The Art of Subversion, Diverse Works, Houston, Texas
Installation and Opening Event, The piece involved the installation of a mock gun rack in the window of the gallery as well as the distribution of hundreds of toy AK-47s to the audience that attended the opening.
Untitled Fun 2, 2005, Project Row Houses Cultural Arts Festival, Houston, Texas
Second of the series of interactive installations that combined play with a fantasy of physical reality.
The patrol breaks contact and reorganizes in the last designated rally point, 2006, Take
One, Glassel Gallery at Houston Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas
Stamps to make your own work to take home.
Grants/Professional Service/Fellowships:
2002 Oberlin Chamber of Commerce Community Grant (Big Parade Funding)
2003 Compton Mentor Fellowship
2004 Bridgeway Fund Foundation (Workshop Houston Funding)
2005 Grant Makers in the Arts Professional Development Guest Artist
2005 Houston Endowment (Workshop Houston Funding)
2005 Juror for AIA Houston Design Competition
2005 J.P. Morgan Chase (Workshop Houston Funding)
2005 Simmons Foundation (Workshop Houston Funding)
2006 Artadia Art Prize Winner