Selected Works of ART
By Zach Kleyn
👨🎨
Production Years: 1989-2023
Through a Veil Darkly
(Photo Series with 8 different images)
-
Digital Print on Archival Paper (Framed)
Editions ⅕ (8 images x 5 editions each = 40 editions total)
Dimensions Framed: 15”x 12”
Zach Kleyn
2023
$300 per framed edition
-
A digital photo series that explores the subtle play between landscape, human impact, artificiality, and ideals of beauty. Kleyn photographed one of his recent 2022 “landscape” sculptures with the protective plastic covering it, ready to be placed into art storage. In this exploration, as he has written elsewhere, he “discovered some kind of aching beauty” that feels both potent and fake.
Truth or Consequences (One of you is going to betray me)
-
Digital Print on Archival Paper (Framed)
Collage on found lithograph print from a book (Framed)
Original Work
Dimensions Framed: 12”x 15”
Zach Kleyn
2015
$400
-
A collage from a series of similar work, “Truth or Consequences (One of you is going to betray me)” is a playful meditation on place, religious indoctrination, and childhood. After becoming obsessed with a strange town in New Mexico named Truth or Consequences, I developed a collection of collages that used both apocalyptic imagery from the photo essay book “Truth or Consequences” by Nick Waplington, as well as cut-out thought and speech bubbles from a Christian comic book that I had growing up in a fundamentalist religious family.
Friends Finding Voices (Stephanie K.)
-
Digital Print on Archival Paper (Framed)
Watercolor (Framed)
Original Work
Dimensions Framed: 19”x 14”
Zach Kleyn
2002
$500
-
From a collection of similar watercolors and executed when I was a sophomore getting my BFA at Biola University, “Friends Finding Voices (Stephanie K.)” is an exploration of the darker sides of pubescent teen life. Using the ephemeral medium of watercolor, I painted portraits of my high school friends without their mouths. Did I erase their ability to speak for themselves? Or am I depicting my friends as I really knew them to be? Young adolescents who were under the “tyranny” of fundamentalist Christianity. 🤔
Self-Self-Portraits
(A Drawing Series with 3 Original Works)
-
Digital Print on Archival Paper (Framed)
Ballpoint pen and pencil on 3 Separate Framed Works
Original Work
Dimensions Framed: 15”x 12”
Zach Kleyn
1989-2013 and Ongoing
$1200 each
-
Beginning when I was 8-years-old, Self-Self-Portraits is a drawing project in collaboration with my younger self. As an adult I returned to the unique self-portraits in my personal archive and proceeded to draw directly onto the paper, copying each mark by hand as carefully as possible, and creating a doppelgänger in each drawing that simultaneously adds to and destroys the original.
I did not plan on returning to the drawings when I originally made them. I don't recall much of what my thinking was then, when they were first made – except that even then I was fascinated with trying to depict 'myself' through representation, and even then I understood how absolutely difficult (impossible?) this was.
Parks & Recreation
(A Photo Series with 6 works)
-
Digital Print on Archival Paper (Framed)
Editions ⅕ (6 works x 5 editions = 30 total works)
Dimensions Framed: 15”x 12”
Zach Kleyn
2006 and 2023
$200 each
-
The recently re-discovered documentation of a performance that took place in Los Angeles in 2006, which were then printed and made into editions for the first time in 2023. The artist, with two artist collaborators (who shall remain unnamed), carried a heavy miniature landscape throughout various parts of Los Angeles, playfully interacting with both the raw environment and other passersby. This series of work is both a meditation on the lack of quality “green spaces” in the urban LA area, and an attempt to literally (and not so literally) bring (artificial) green space to the city that the artist inhabited and loved for over 20 years.
Snowball Fights with Friends (Shant)
-
Digital Print on Archival Paper (Framed)
Editions ⅕
Dimensions Framed: 10”x 10”
Zach Kleyn
2009
$100
-
A playful series from when Kleyn was making work between his undergraduate and graduate art education experiences: “Snowball Fights with Friends” is a series of digital photos in which Kleyn poured salt over portraits of his friends that he had in his wallet at the time (a time when printed photographs were much more common), and then photographed each work painstakingly with an 8x10 high format camera, scanning the negatives at high resolution, and then printed each work smaller than original size on archival photo paper.
Twin Flame
(A Photo Series with 3 Images)
-
Digital Print on Archival Paper (Framed)
Editions ⅕ (3 images x 5 editions = 15 total works)
Dimensions Framed: 16” x 16”
Zach Kleyn
2010
$400
-
I first constructed a digital video using the raw footage of my family’s home video camcorder, from which I created a series of images in which my younger self was mirrored in a sort of horrifying Rorschach Test. These remaining digital prints explore the inevitable violence of childhood, identity, and self-development.
The Trumpet (The Wormhole)
-
Plaster, paint, dried foliage, foam, wood, and miniature figurines.
Original work, sculpture.
Dimensions Framed: 35”x 35”x41”
Zach Kleyn
2022
$2888 (Includes custom Installation)
Best when installed on a wall with a hole
-
When installed in a gallery, “The Trumpet (The Worm Hole)“, first appears as simply a circle on a wall. Upon further inspection, however, the viewer discovers that it’s actually a hole in the wall, and they can see through to the other side. There is a tiny figurine of a man standing on the edge of the cylinder, facing away from the viewer and appearing to broadcast something into the other mysterious space behind the wall.
On the other side of this wall, the viewer finds a miniature forest landscape in the shape of a trumpet (or a worm hole). The landscape is rendered in three dimensions as realistically as possible, and it’s easy to get lost in the magical space of the miniature.
Playing with the muddied boundaries between sculpture, architecture, psychology, story-telling, ecology, and sustainability, “The Trumpet” creates strange associations that have the tendency to be more than the sum of the parts; the images and associations tend to stick with and “haunt” the viewer long after this sculpture has been witnessed.
Dear Stranger: Housesitting
(A Photo Series with 18 Images)
-
Digital Photo printed on Archival Paper (Framed)
Editions ⅕ (18 images x 3 editions each = 54 editions total)
Framed Dimensions and Prices vary according to each specific work:
10” x 10” = $99
15” x 12” = $199
24” x 36” = $599
Zach Kleyn
2010-2022
-
Inspired by a photo series by the Japanese artist Shizuka Yokomizo, Kleyn’s “Dear Stranger: Housesitting” series is a meditation on voyeurism, portraiture, absence, and longing.
Yokomizo’s original photo series (which inspired Kleyn), “Dear Stranger,” was completed between 1998 and 2000 in New York. Yokomizo began by sending a anonymous letters to strangers with apartment windows that opened to the street, asking if they would be willing to pose for her camera from inside their apartment at a certain date and time. She then proceeded to show up outside of their apartment window with her camera on the selected date and time, and sometimes her subjects would appear as well. The resulting photographs are both playful and unnerving, as we witness Yokomizo’s StranDear Strangergers willingly (but often cautiously) share themselves with Yokomizo’s camera.
Kleyn’s version of this, “Dear Stranger: Housesitting,” extends the photography project into his subject’s homes, and in their absence. Each image from this series was taken while Kleyn was housesitting the homes of family, friends, and acquaintances.
A unique kind of portraiture emerges within these constraints: one in which the subject(s) are explored and indirectly depicted through the subject’s own creation of their home environment, while at the same time Kleyn’s own image and self-portraiture is stirred into the mix. The viewer gets the sense that Kleyn is “playing house,” and perhaps secretly fantasizing about what it would be like to replace the individual or family who actually lives there
Time to Grow Up, Bitch
-
Original Family Photo and Frame, Permanent Marker
Dimensions: 23” x 16” x 2” (With Original Frame)
Zach Kleyn
1983, 2023
$1999
-
“Time to Grow Up, Bitch” emphasizes the themes of self-identification, family & religious trauma, playfulness, and humor, which have appeared in Kleyn’s work from the very beginning. Kleyn’s simple yet permanent gesture of drawing a silly mustache on his own childhood portrait shows an irreverence, or possibly a disrespect, for his earlier self (or the earlier fictional representation of his self as seen through the “lens” of his parents).
An act of rebellion and revisionist re-writing, “Time to Grow Up, Bitch” proposes that all of us can make choices to change the learned layers and patterns of family, culture, and education, in order to become the fullest version of our “truest self.”
For more information