Zach Nader
channel surf
January 9 – February 16, 2015
Opening reception Friday January 9, 6-9pm

Microscope is very pleased to present channel surf, the first solo exhibition of new works by Zach Nader at the gallery. With new videos and inkjet prints based on appropriated fashion ads, commercials, and Hollywood movies the Brooklyn artist remains concerned with the language of the imagery that surrounds us and its effects on the advertisement/viewer relationship. In his works, Nader employs the misuse of software editing tools exposing the technology behind digital image-creation itself and searching for new aesthetic realms, pushing the processes to ever-increasing extremes including motion and chroma breakdown.

In his two series of digital print works, Nader re-photoshops the fashion ad, digitally removing and refilling all people and products across color-channels or layers of images. With Screams, the artist repeats the operation on each RGB channel of single image sources until color bursts and displacements are generated. In the second series Nodes, a title referencing the moiré interference patterns usually unwelcome in digital photography that the artist here has inserted into each, the fight for visibility between multiple image layers result in a shredded paper appearance, challenging the viewer’s perception with illusions of three-dimensionality.

In similar manners, using footage from tv and movies, the three single-channel videos on view find Nader disrupting the standard use of the medium and conceiving alternative ways to produce or affect motion. The artist’s integration of the movement of the “waves” of sports fans in a stadium to the rhythm of ocean waves in the movie “The Master” causes at times the complete unhinging of the image in his 2 minute 24 second the wave. In shift (9 minutes 15 seconds) layered commercials are decelerated until the only perceptible movement is produced by a morphing tool attempting to create seamless transitions between the frames.

TV commercials are subjects of further investigation in someone to see (2 minutes 7 seconds), a work that provides the most direct link between the moving image and the print works on exhibit, in which all human figures have been erased frame-by-frame. In ghost-like scenes, bicycles, meals, drinks, basketballs, sponges and other familiar everyday objects dance in new surroundings, untethered from scripted pasts.

“channel surf”, partial installation view


channel surf opens Friday January 9th and continues through Monday February 16th.
An opening reception will be held on Friday January 9th, from 6 to 9pm. Press preview 5-6pm.

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ZACH NADER is a Brooklyn-based artist originally from Dallas, Texas. His reworking of existing photographic imagery has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently during a month-long nightly video installation on 23 advertisement billboards as part of Midnight Moment in New York’s Times Square, as well as in Breaking Ground: Contemporary Photography, College of William & Mary, inaugurating the University’s Department of Photography in 2014. His work has also been featured in publications including ArtFCity, ArtObserved, Hyperallergic, L Magazine, Photograph Magazine, The New Criterion, Arts and Science Journal, and VICE, among others. Nader completed an Art & Science Residency this past fall at The Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation in Brooklyn, NY.

Additional images as well as previews of the works are available upon request at inquires@microscopegallery.com

Zach Nader, “283267079 (endless waves)”, 2015, inkjet print, 20 x 30 inches