Zackary Drucker
Installation View of Luis De Jesus Los Angeles at VOLTA New York 2012 featuring Zackary Drucker
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to participate in VOLTA New York 2012 featuring new and recent works by Zackary Drucker.
Drawing from feminist and queer theoretical discourse, Zackary Drucker’s work addresses sexual exploitation, transgender representation, and drag performance in order to explore relationships that facilitate queer/countercultural lineage. Interested in obliterating language obstacles, pulverizing identity disorders and revealing dark subconscious layers of outsider agency, Drucker’s work reinvents and redistributes traditionally-held binary formulas and power relationships between spectacle and voyeur, dominator and subjugated, and the domesticated and the exoticized. Keeping normative culture on the periphery, Drucker focuses instead on "reading"—a sub-cultural dialect of resistance, and uses her body to illicit desire, judgment, and voyeuristic shame from her viewer. Zackary Drucker's critical indecision to live above the radar, below definition, and beyond static representation, ultimately aims to teach us about ourselves.
At the center of the installation, inside a booth with a gold interior, will be a presentation of Drucker’s videos, including “Lost Lake”, “At Least You Know You Exist”, and “You will never, ever be a woman. You must live the rest of your days entirely as a man, and you will only get more masculine with each passing year. There is no way out.” Filmed at the peak of autumn foliage in a rural Midwestern US locale, “Lost Lake” (produced in collaboration with A.L. Steiner), a non-narrative short film, posits beauty and fear as inextricable from the psyche of the American landscape. Contemplative moments and stunning vistas are jarringly punctuated with the vocabularies of witch-hunts, hate crimes and psychological violence.
Accompanying the video in the space will be four light boxes from the photo series “Don’t Look At Me Like That”, a collaboration with London-based photographer Manual Vason, which employs a range of house-hold props and tableaus that strive toward the portrayal of bodily identity—infused with acute, masochistic emotional compulsions.
Exhibited salon style on the exterior walls of the booth will be photographs from “Distance is where the heart is, home is where you hang your heart”. (See reverse side for description.)
Zackary Drucker earned a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2007 and a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2005. She has performed and exhibited her work internationally in venues including the 54th Venice Biennale (Swiss Off-Site Pavilion); Curtat Tunnel, Lausanne, Switzerland; L.u.c.c.a. Museum of Contemporary Art, Lucca, IT; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; REDCAT and LACE, Los Angeles; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; Deitch Projects and Leo Koenig Inc., New York; and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, among others.