Zachary Ayotte is a Canadian artist, photographer and writer. He was born in Yellowknife, NT and raised in Edmonton, AB.
He currently lives in Edmonton.
Statement
I am interested in ideas around “world building” and what the creation of spaces, both real and imagined, can suggest about shared social systems and their influence on the individual. I think of these spaces as areas that have the potential to exist outside the influence of social systems, which often manifest in my work as spaces that are domestic, natural or nocturnal.
In thinking about the ways we construct “worlds,” I am interested in raising questions about how systems influence our relationship to the body, how systemic values persist outside systemic structures and how constructed worlds relate to our shared world. I think of world building largely through sensory perception and am curious about the relationship between the visible and the invisible, how values become encoded in visual information and what we can know from looking at something.
I choose to define the body broadly as the physical structure of a thing and see it both a point of engagement and as a form that mediates engagement (an interface). As an interface, the body shapes an individual's relationship to the world but also serves as an access point for perception. Because it allows a kind of connection, the body can suggest information and intimacy but as an interface it is also a means of translation and as such, maintains a level of obscurity.
The idea of an asymptote (two lines that get closer and closer to each other but never touch) acts as a persistent metaphor in my work for thinking about the gap between information and perception and the relationship between constructed worlds and the systemic realities of shared social structures.
CV
For portrait portfolio, click here