Don’t Look at Me Like That / Zackary Drucker

By admin / 10 Jun ’11 / art, photography / No Comments

Don’t Look at Me Like That, 2010, collaboration with Manuel Vason.

The disciple of a silenced, ghettoized community, Zackary Drucker, a young transgendered artist/performer from Los Angeles, uses a range of creative devices that all strive towards the portrayal of bodily identity, her own and that of others, obsessively infusing visual media— photographs, videos and performance art—with acute, masochistic emotional compulsions. Her work is a self-revelation of being, borne on the current of physical, corporeal corollaries, with an extreme delicacy in the extreme gesture of achieving selfhood. Conceiving, discovering, and manifesting herself as “a woman in the wrong world”. Marginalization demands that one lay claim to alternative, remote, difcult material, and Zackary Drucker readopts the lexicon of Bruce Rodgers’s The Queen’s Vernacular in calm, careful rhythms that are punctuated by resonant vocal and visual musicality.

With emotional fuctuations in apparent soliloquies, sculptural tensions within a vivid, graceful body, the artist makes a spectacle of herself, of her sexual self, in autobiographical manifestos that have been presented at various international venues, including the SPILL Festival in London, 2009; Les Rencontres International in Paris, Berlin and Madrid, 2008; and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, 2007. After earning her MFA in Photography and Media from the California Institute of Art, Zackary Drucker became well-known on the American art scene primarily through her appearance in the series Artstar, a reality show documenting the daily life of eight American artists, which aired in 2005 on the Gallery HD channel with the support of the New York gallery Deitch Projects. In Italy, she was featured in the sixth edition of the international Gender Bender Festival, Bologna, in 2008.