Zak Ové
Memories, Making, and Re-Imagining, The Image Issue, Laboratory Arts Collective Magazine, Los Angeles, California: 2018
The first time I visited Zak Ové’s home and studio I was welcomed by the most fantastical assembly – Lost Souls, Yoruba Gods, a Wild Thing, Dogon Princess, and the Invisible Man.
These hybrid sculptures activated not only the room that we shared, but also a rich pool of references from African oral history and Caribbean Carnival, to contemporary pop culture and global identity politics. After spending more time in their presence and getting to know their maker, it became clear that they were all paragons communicating Ové’s reflective and hopeful artistic vision. His vision is never solely rooted in the present moment, but rather in flux between the past – his creatively radical upbringing and ancestral cultural legacy, and the future – his progressive imagination of what we as humans can strive to be. Through the diverse mediums of film, photography, painting, sculpture, and installation, Ové’s practice focuses on referencing old world culture through new world materials in an effort to simultaneously collapse and fortify these periods of time. The result conjures ancient mythologies and future worlds, giving life to works that represent our diverse human journeys and proudest moments in order to galvanize us to be our greatest selves.