About
Bio:
Zach Wassef (b.2003) is an image and sound-based artist who is from the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex, resides in Brooklyn, and is currently a candidate in their final year for their Bachelor in Fine Art in Photography from Parsons School for Design. Their work focuses on the home and interruptions of the natural world caused by humans. Often, the climate emergency and the effects of technological politics act as a motif in their work. Wassef has been featured in group exhibitions at Drexel University in 2019 and 2020, Dallas Center of Photography in 2020, and three group shows in the Parsons BFA Gallery in 2023 and 2024. They have also curated multiple zines and four group exhibitions for the Parsons BFA Photography Gallery. Their upcoming exhibitions include the 2025 Parsons BFA Photography Thesis show.
Artist Statement:
In my practice, I explore boundaries, traces, the notion of will, and disappearance through the medium of photography, sound, the archive, and moving-image. My visual work often blends landscape and still-life imagery, archiving the trail of memory or evidence of human activity. Focusing on the environmental collapse and its connection with human rights and memory, I work on the edge of man’s obstruction and isolation in my search for the limits of human activity and chase the ghosts that it leaves behind. While my work mirrors the visual codes of landscape photography, I think of the images as portraits of the land.
Wandering the land and listening attentively holds a delicate place in my practice. Tenderness naturally is intertwined with my images as my practice is only possible with the collaboration of the unexplainable. I allow myself to be led by the invisible forces and ghostly figures that lead to the residue that human activity inherently leaves behind.I aim to absolve myself into the landscape, allowing me to listen and be led to the fragments I aim to archive. I desire to memorialize the marks and wounds that reflect human authority, bear witness to the trauma of land, and to contribute to the understanding that individual will does not stray far from that of the natural world.