Please Note: This workshop is limited to 15 participants. Please RSVP below.
Join us in the Classroom for a Workshop with June Resident Alex Zak!
Participants will learn the basics of weaving using yarn and individual frame looms made with the help of the Chattanooga Public Library’s Maker Space. We will discuss resources and materials that can be used to make your own tools, as well as the ease of exploration and experimentation with frame loom weaving. This will include possible pattern, texture, and color relationships using second hand materials with some from the surrounding environment (weather permitting).
Participants will leave with the basic knowledge of how to weave, their own frame loom, tools, and a sample started during the workshop.
Alex Zak makes work that explores the flattening of culture in tourist imaginaries. Zak is from coastal Florida where they gained a familiarity to the labor and consumption that occurs within leisure economies. Using a wide variety of materials—such as found objects, sand, textiles, clay and wood, among others—they rework images and symbols informed by the desire and decadence of such locations to explore history, culture, and labor that is obscured. In doing so, Zak builds and produces installations, sculptures, videos, and performances that reflect on the state of local ecologies and communities while interrogating the visual landscape of the spaces we often vacation to.
Zak Received both a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and recently received their Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Yale School of Art. They have exhibited in Chicago, IL, New Haven, CT, New York, NY, Saint Petersburg and Tampa, FL and Varanasi, India.