Zak Kitnick’s Cookie-Cutter Sculptures
At his organized studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, California-born artist Zak Kitnick informs ARTnews: “Found images and discovered things and discovered patterns [have] constantly been very important to my work.” Russian theorist Viktor Shklovsky’s saying, that art makes the familiar odd, is on complete display screen on Kitnick’s studio walls, where the eye is drawn to a series of marquetry works, in bronze, brass, copper, stainless-steel, galvanized steel, and aluminum, based upon the style of a backgammon board.
Kitnick’s sculptural pieces typically riff on common items. The Productive Years (Construction Tools Cookie Cutter Set– 4 Piece– Saw, Pliers, Wrench, Hammer– Ann Clark– Tin Plated Steel(2020), for instance, takes as its beginning point handyman’s tools, whose shapes were eliminated of a wax piece with cookie cutters prior to the piece was cast in bronze. It is presently on view in Kitnick’s program, “Crenellations,” at Planet Earth LLC in Woodbridge, Connecticut.
” When I think about cookie cutters,” states Kitnick, “my mind goes to homes. What I like about cookie-cutter homes is that they’re based upon seriality, variation, and repeating. You may have, for instance, 2 possible roofing system lines offered in 2 various paint colors. That provides you all these various mixes from the exact same 4 aspects.”
The piece is among a series of works made with commercially offered cookie cutters whose styles– woman’s night out, baseball, infant shower– represent stages of life. “For The Productive Years,” Kitnick states, “I picked tools.”
To make each operate in this series, Kitnick initially cast a piece of foundry wax in the size he wanted for the last sculpture. After warming his cookie cutters with a blowtorch till they were red hot, he wore leather gloves and pushed the cutters into the wax. While the wax was still warm and ugly, he turned up each cutout so that it sat (and cooled) perpendicularly to its matching unfavorable area.
” I most likely made 6 or 8 wax molds for The Productive Years, that I have not melted down yet,” Kitnick states. “I might possibly still cast any of them at a later date, however this is the one I picked.”
A foundry in California made bronze casts from the wax molds for the series. The very first couple of times Kitnick sent out works to the foundry, he states, “I made a box and sent it to the foundry, and after that the foundry returned the cast in a various box. I took the cast to the polisher, who sent it back in yet another box, which the gallery chose up prior to making their own box to save the work in. There were all these various bundles made for simply one things.”
Eventually Kitnick spray-painted through and around each work to produce a stencil, then utilized the stencil to make a box with foam inserts that might be utilized over and over, to lessen ecological effect.
He likewise wound up doing his own polishing–” among the filthiest tasks you can picture,” he states. “But I still wasn’t sure how I desired them to be ended up.” Kitnick explore surfaces for the pieces for numerous years. “After about a year, I utilized a chemical to darken the bronze,” he keeps in mind, “that made it look like the color of the foundry wax. I wasn’t pleased, so a year after that, I provided the pieces an actually high polish. I lined the studio walls with plastic and utilized all these various high-RPM rotary tools in addition to a polishing item for bronze called rouge.”
In the end, the whole procedure of making the series took 5 years. A teacher of mine as soon as stated, ‘When you believe a work is done, sweep up,'” Kitnick states. “I keep in mind the very first time I had someone assist me in the studio. At the end of the day, they got a broom and began sweeping, and I was, like, ‘No, I like to do that.’ Since that’s when the piece is done.”