Portrait #43: Zac

This drawing session with Zac took place on one of the nicest days of Spring so far, right after our sculpture class. Since Zac had just sat through my presentation of my Sketchy Lady project (for an ongoing "twice weekly" assignment) he had all kinds of questions while I was drawing him. For example, "Do you think about what you write in the posts while you are drawing people?" So I made a mental note to write about that.

Recently, Zac was kind enough to play my interviewer in a video piece I did for our class, Hey Girl Hey, episode 13: Two Folds in the Schmutzy Fabric of Space and Time. The project really wouldn't have been half as successful without Zac's interpretation of his part. He claimed to me that we traded his acting for my lending him the video camera (he made a hilarious video about Davy Crockett) but told him that his performance was so valuable that I still owe him. This is when he asked me if I was still doing my Sketchy Lady project and if he could be drawn after class. Perhaps we are even now?

It is confusing to me whether me or my sitter is doing the bigger favor for the other. on the one hand, they get to be immortalized in graphite and on the internet, but also they have to sit still for a pretty long time. (This is one part that Zac didn't like very much... he took lots of stretching breaks.)

I'm glad Zac and I have finally gotten to collaborate on some art related stuff. A couple assignments ago, we chose really similar topics (Jews & radicalism) to make our pieces on and in one of our class discussions I asked him if we could collab, but he said he needed to work it out on his own. Zac ended up coming up with this really amazing performance piece where he re-Bar Mitzvahed himself in the SLC spiritual space. This new Bar Mitzvah was performed through a radical lens, as Zac delivered a d'var torah about the changes in his Jewish identity since his first Bar Mitzvah. He had the class read passages from a Judith Butler essay on the backlash against anti-Zionist Jews, as if we were a congregation. It was a really successful project that I'm glad Zac maintained the space to work on alone.