ARTIST'S STATEMENTI draw and paint landscapes that are complex, layered, and modular. I translate printmaking techniques into hand made marks that replicate the color systems used in both digital images and commercial printing, creating images that are paradoxically both tactile and “digital”, visually specific but simultaneously elusive and dream like.
I am fascinated with the relationship between technology, labor, and the idea of nature. I see the images I make as both Rorschach Tests and psychic projections. They are less about the external, natural world than they are about reconstructing a parallel natural world reflecting our fears, memories, and desires.
One image that I think about constantly is a hand-made “digital” drawing made by NASA scientists in 1965. That year the Mars Mariner 4 Spacecraft transmitted 22 black and white digital photographs of the surface of Mars back to earth. Transmitting the data for each photograph took over 6 hours, and it took even longer to process the image. The engineers at Nasa didn’t want to wait, so they printed out the numerical color grid of each pixel and colored them in by hand with pastels to slowly construct a picture of “mars”. The value scale and the modular grid structure of the drawing corresponded directly to the transmitted data, but the intensity of the hues was pure invention, reflecting a mars that only existed in the scientists’ imaginations.
I want to make pictures like that but of Earth.
Each image I make is a complex composite of sources. They all begin as explorations of remote places: walks, rambles, hikes, and climbs. I document these journeys through the landscape with notes, photographs, and sketches which I will later composite into drawings based on my incomplete memories of the places I have passed through. The images that result are strange hybrids, half remembered amalgamations of multiple separate facts, impressions, and spaces. This ambiguity is an important artist’s material for me, since it represents an honest recognition of just how subjective, fragmentary, and incomplete my own perceptions are and how distant we all are from any objective understanding of what nature is outside of us.
I want to invite you to inhabit these provisional spaces and to project what you will onto them. Because in the end I suspect all of my labor might be less about documenting nature and more about building a mirror that reflects the complicated parts of ourselves back at us.
ARTIST'S BIOGRAPHYMichael Zachary grew up in New Hampshire and lives and works in Boston,MA.
He holds a BA from Bowdoin College and an MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
His most recently solo and two person exhibitions include: Boston University (2025); Simmons University (2025); Cost Annex in Boston, MA (2020); Rhode Island College (2018); Room 68 in Provincetown, MA (2020 and 2017); Frontierspace in Missoula, MT (2016); and The Arts Research Collaborative in Lowell, MA (2014). His work is also featured regularly in group exhibitions nationally and internationally.
In 2024 he was a resident at the Dipper A.I.R program in Billings, MT; in 2020 he received a residency fellowship from the Josef and Anne Albers Foundation and an Assets for Artists Grant from Mass MoCA; in 2018 he was awarded a Finalist’s Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council’s Fellowship Program; and in 2017 he received both an individual grant from the Berkshire Taconic Foundation’s Artist’s Resource Trust and a Blanche Coleman Award from Boston University.
He has taught at Northeastern University, The University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and Simmons University and currently teaches painting at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
