Zachary Royer Scholz | Nothing Is Ever Finished
May 24 - June 23, 2012
Eli Ridgway Gallery is pleased to present Zachary Royer Scholz’ first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Zachary Royer Scholz makes artworks by reshaping existing objects and situations. His actions do not entirely overwrite previous uses and histories, but extend what is already present into new, unexpected terrains. For the exhibition, Nothing Is Ever Finished, Scholz has turned his situational and contingent methodology on itself: creating new pieces out of his own previously exhibited artworks. Pieces have been combined, split apart, rearranged, entombed, or erased. The resulting artworks are new iterations rather than definitive endpoints; they remain suggestively open-ended like the intuitive processes that generated them. They may change again, or they may not. More than simply meditations on ephemerality, the new pieces exist as complexly entangled entities whose presence is always partial and predicated by absence. It is a liminal existence that, like our own, is both informed by and at the expense of its past.
Zachary Royer Scholz’ previous projects with the gallery include the 2010 hallway project Tape, Paint, Repaint, and the project space solo exhibition, Crumple Crumple, earlier this year.
Zachary Royer Scholz
10.510.512-J (plaster, paint, tape), 2012
10.5 x 10.5 inches
Zachary Royer Scholz
353570.512 (wood, spackle, paint), 2012
70.5 x 35 x 35 inches
Zachary Royer Scholz
30407912 (rope), 2012
79 x 30 x 40 inches
Zachary Royer Scholz
43434312 (upholstery foam), 2012
43 x 43 x 43 inches
Zachary Royer Scholz: New pieces arise from the old
San Francisco Chronicle
May 31, 2012
by Kimberly Chun
True to the title of Zachary Royer Scholz's current exhibition at Eli Ridgway Gallery, "Nothing Is Ever Finished," little is set in stone for the San Francisco artist - apart from the fact that everything in his life seemed to lead him toward his practice.
"As a kid, I would for hours tinker in the garage, just taking things apart and putting them together, interacting with the materials and carving things," he recalled while putting the finishing touches on the show. "Playful investigation without a goal."
Even when Scholz, 34, set off on various, seemingly divergent paths - studying mechanical engineering then geology as an undergraduate before earning his bachelor's degree in art at Stanford University - those pursuits somehow became incorporated into his art-making.
"I came to the realization that structures and mechanical forces and the way objects interact with and shape each other, those critical aspects of mechanical engineering and geology and lived experience were better served by an artistic approach," he muses. "The final thing was grad school (at California College of the Arts). It forces you to blow through all the ideas you've saved on the back burner and pushes you to find out where your core interests lie."
For Scholz, those interests seem primarily embedded in sculpture, with a focus on materials - whether they're as banal as the innards of a family room couch or as random as discarded lumber unearthed at the dump. "Nothing Is Ever Finished" specifically sees the artist revisiting and reworking pieces he's exhibited in the past - "an iterative regurgitation of work," as he puts it. It's a natural extension of an artistic strategy that pivots on material with its own past life or history.
"Everything we use is in the process of being used and reused - none of it is raw," Scholz says. "After all, all those atoms were once part of an exploding star."
In the case "Nothing Is Ever Finished," split bamboo strips collected from window shades, which once sprayed and curled in an earlier work, have been refashioned into a dome, while lengths of rope that were used in a performative piece at Southern Exposure have grown a spine in a new figure-eight shape and reach for the sky. Midcentury powder-coated steel library shelves built to last forever have been reimagined as accordion-like, mirroring triangles, a reflection of a previous incarnation spent dialoguing with other structures at a Lab exhibit.
https://www.sfgate.com/art/article/Zachary-Royer-Scholz-3596735.php