OUTSIDE HIGH AND LOW

A solo presentation by Zach Weber.

Curated by Ayrika Hall.

April 5th - April 27th, 2025

600 w Van Buren Street, Chicago IL 60607

Flowers no.36 2023. Porcelain, glaze. 16.5 x 25 x 12 in

Throughout Outside High and Low, Zachary Weber examines the ontological conditions of form, wherein material asserts its agency through repetition, reconstruction, and continuous interplay. Weber’s work—assemblages of clay, gold luster, tarp, found objects, photography, canvas, paint, and ceramic—operate in a space where their inherent qualities are continually interrogated, reformed, and reimagined. Many of these elements, such as drop cloths, rolled aluminum, and tarps emerge from industrial contexts as barrier materials, originally intended to conceal, shield, or be discarded. Recast as aesthetic agents, they disrupt distinctions between the provisional and the resolved, the functional and the expressive. Further, through probing infrastructures which traditionally impose order, such as grids, vessels, and archives, Weber explores the generative tension between coherence and entropy, establishing a field in which process produces meaning as an ongoing condition rather than a fixed outcome. Through punctures, weavings, cutouts, and structural breaks, these works render their construction legible, allowing the process to register as part of their formal and conceptual integrity.

Meaning and value emerge as mobile forces, shifting through relation to composition and material, yet never subordinated to aesthetic hierarchy or resolution. Weber raises a fundamental inquiry: How can process, itself a temporal and relational act, be held in suspension, indefinitely present within its objecthood? The exhibition offers a space in which structure escapes the inherited binaries of totality and fragmentation, of elevated and mundane; instead, proposing a language built on exchange, accumulation, and visual dialogue.

The grid, a quintessential emblem of modernist spatial rationalism, reappears throughout Weber’s practice as a pliable framework: a universal geometry reimagined through the contingencies of material, where logic yields to each process’s rhythm. The presence of the grid is never completely deconstructed, but modulated and bent toward an effective register. In coiled ceramic, it embeds itself within vertical syntax; elsewhere, it is refracted and scored into clay, traced with pigment across photos, or woven into relational constructions. Photography extends Weber’s material concerns into questions of site through surface, offering a way to frame presence through cropped pictorial fragments. Based on periods 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 a discursive map, woven 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.

Outside High and Low considers Weber’s spatial language as a choreography of encounter in which sculptural arrangements unfold like visual stanzas, favoring material rhythm over fixed interpretation, shaped by emotional logics that slip beyond symbolic comprehension. Across this exhibition, Weber builds a grammar where structure leads, metaphor follows, and no clear boundary divorces process from form. These works drift away from fixed declarations or outright refusals. Rather, they take shape as provisional vessels of time and place—ways to hold attention, rework value, and allow material to carry meaning beyond conventional interpretation. - Ayrika Hall

LIMITED EDITION WORKS

Limited edition works. 2025 Mixed media. (Hard pastele, transparency print, oil, house paint, marker on paper)

Each work is unique and approx. 12 × 17 inches.

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.

Zach Weber

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 PrattUniversity.

Ayrika Hall

Ayrika Hall is a Chicago-based curator and art historian specializing in the historicization of Black art as a contingent, affective, and materially engaged process—an ongoing negotiation in which narratives take shape and acquire function. She works with the conditions under which Black artistic practices are absorbed into history, questioning how their legibility is achieved, what conceptual habis regulate their interpretation, and where those habits begin to break down. For her, art history is less a stable record than a site of artistic activity, where meaning is produced through accumulation, omission, and contestation. In her curatorial practice, Hall treats exhibition-making as a historiographic act, a space where the mechanics of visibility and reception play out in real time.