The week of September 21-25 marked the restart of our in-person NYSCA funded workspace residencies with artist Zachary Fabri. Zachary’s residency coincided with the restart of Alfred University operations and the academic year after the COVID closedowns.

The IEA was truly fortunate and privileged to have Zachary Fabri as our first 2020 NYSCA Electronic Media & Film AIR. The IEA’s commitment to artists experimental projects, and its other space-time resulting from our geography, at the historical moment at the end of spring and summer shutdowns, having Zachary here during this moment was magical.

Fabri during his time with us took full rein of the IEA’s open-space for art-making as he communicated during his Zoom Artist-talk with students and faculty. His week was one where he could “hangout and play” as a way to engage in his practice creating “vulnerable experiments”. And that during the week he engaged in the “theatrically of making” letting his “lived experience as a political body”, human/civil rights, climate change and the contemporary-virtual organically come through his work via such experiments.

Zach made studio and field performance-for-camera recordings during his week at the IEA. Early in the week Zachary made recordings with the Signal Culture SSSScan application. EM faculty Eric Souther then developed a new Slit-scan program in TouchDesigner for Fabri to use at the IEA. Zachary made music recordings, camera recordings at Canacedia Creek as well as drawing performances for camera.

Zachary Fabri is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice mines the intersection of his personal life and local community, with concerns surrounding cultural commodification, gentrification, and public space. He has been awarded The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art and the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Fabri’s work has been exhibited at Art in General, The Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, The Walker Art Center, The Brooklyn Museum, The Barnes Foundation, Performa, the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Biennial, and Pace gallery. Fabri lives and works in Flatbush, Brooklyn.