STATEMENT
William Mazza is a Hudson Valley visual artist with a focus on art-making as a form of popular communication, and a practice centered in democratic and community-based arts. Exploiting chance operation, collaboration, accumulation, and duration across studio and performative practices, the artist documents spatial and temporal relationships of people to their environments, scribing a cartography to map the conceptual boundaries of lived experience.
The most material expressions of this project are drawings and paintings created by translating subjects such as inhabited environments, intervals of dislocation, television and film, printed texts, music, and dance into visual representations. Less direct expressions include ephemera or artifacts generated from projected durational painting, or from projecting ive painting mixed with custom video and animation during improvised, collaborative, interdisciplinary performances—most often with a mix of musicians, dancers, and poets.
Collaboration also finds expression in short- or long-term engagement with community-based arts organizations including The Belladonna* Collaborative, the interdisciplinary Arts for Art / Vision Festival, and the Matzo Files (a flat file gallery) in NYC, or the upstate artist collective Altered Space Community Arts (Syracuse, NY), and the artist cooperative State of the Art Gallery (Ithaca, NY). These experiences not only expand the definition of cultural work from the individual outward in practice, they also manifest in unexpected opportunities to collaborate across disciplines, inspiring and enriching the solo practice through a practical symbiosis.
BIO
CCurrently practicing art and design out of William Mazza Studio in Beacon, NY, the artist graduated with a BFA from Syracuse University in 1989. The 80s/90s were transition times for the arts in the US, with the AIDS crisis and the concurrent public arts debates (re)raising questions about the responsibility of artists to contribute as agents of social change. For the artist these questions informed a practice often located outside the studio, expressed at times as collective and cooperative community art projects, event production, design, curation, and performance.
Living and working in Syracuse, NY during the 1990s, this outward focus resulted in a de-emphasis on studio painting and a move toward an “in the service of” practice of community-based alternative media and arts projects, finding diverse expression in as street theater, education, design, and curation.
After relocating to Brooklyn, NY in 2000, this practice continued primarily through work with artists and artist-led organizations serving communities traditionally under-represented in the arts. These engagements eventually led to live, performative improvised painting and video collaborations with musicians, dancers, and writers.
Reciprocally, this performance practice impacted the artist’s approach to studio painting, generating a renewed commitment to more traditional studio arts--with a particular emphasis on experience of lived environments—while continuing to engage performative and collaborative projects as they arise.