Outside High and Low

A solo presentation by Zach Weber. Curated by Ayrika Hall.

April 5 - April 27, 2025

600 w Van Buren Street, Chicago IL 60607

Zach Weber (b. 1997) was born and lives in Chicago, IL. His work is both self-referencing and an interrogation of how physical environments speak through urban language and universal geometry.

Weber’s sculptural and installation work hinges on form and freedom as a pair of communicative forces, and ultimately finds how they denote space as a medium, all its own. Weber carries specified awareness for how shape informs all else. In his practice, what is strict in form is handled freely — observing the apparent rigidity of urban banalities, arriving at an inevitable view of their idiosyncrasies and improvisations.

Weber holds a BFA from The Art Institute of Chicago and is pursuing an MFA from Pratt University.

An Edition of 15 works made between Dakar and Chicago

This will be the second in our yearly edition series created by Chicago based artists. Based on a period spent in Senegal, the images in Weber’s Surface Studies series focus on the everyday sites of Dakar’s built environment, capturing patterns and textures that accumulate through movement, history, and repeated observation. Instead of functioning purely as a documentary account, the photographs form an episodic map, shaped by observation and visitation. Each image functions as an inscriptive citation, referencing a specific encounter while allowing wandering itself to act as a generative force within the series. Weber asserts the grid, overlaid atop images taken during this trip, as a way of unsettling the archive’s rigidity through the shifting logic of memory. The gesture transforms acts of capture into a process of ongoing attention, allowing documentary form to hold not only the image but the conditions of its making.

Details from a few of the edition works. Hard pastele, transparency print, enamel or house paint on paper, 2025