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 the ways that we can use the visible to reveal the invisible. To that end, I use photography, writing and other media to try and uncover myths, systems, histories, and echoes. I am curios how these things exist within the body and in space, how we carry them, how we are carried by them, how we transform them and how we release them. In my work, I think of the physical both as form in space and as an interface for ideas, emotion and stories.
The Body
I often work with the body, which I choose to define broadly as the physical structure of a thing and see as 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. I similarly think of an image as an interface and believe that the way we read both images and bodies is complicated by perception, which I believe is influenced by the systems we are a part of.
Asymptote
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 distance between information and perception and the distance between a viewer and an image. I see this gap as both a flaw in our capacity to “know” things through visual information and as a seductive quality that can be a trap in an image.
CV
For portrait portfolio, click here