Photograph: Heidi Grass

About

Alexander Ziv

b. San Francisco, CA, 1988.

Currently residing in Nevada County, CA.

My recent works, composed of gouache on paper, explore to extract my own ever developing definition of “American identity”. While attempting to define a broad sense of identity is nearly improbable due to America’s constantly shifting cultural landscape, by exploring moments of recent and historical American events through a tailored visual language, I create and constantly recreate my own identity as a pathway to understanding the current. I hope to enhance and highlight topics of historical and societal turbulence that effect the individual, and therefore society on a larger scale. My work attempts to function metonymically by associating visually graphic insignias, cultural identifiers, traces of my surroundings, and encounters without elaborating on the relation between them to create views of a vantage driven American narrative based on identity and heritage.  These identifiers orbit and utilize topics of race, gender, the authoritative voice, escapism into the western American landscape, idealism and the attempt to belong as vehicles to further dissect identity.