Jeff Zilm

Working primarily with mixed media on canvas, Jeff Zilm deconstructs technology—from the Stone Age to the Information Age—and the act of painting itself. He works in series, focusing on such inventions as Neolithic arrowheads, photography, film, and the Internet. By affixing grainy, black-and-white, iron-on images of arrowheads onto canvases, for example, he highlights their obsolescence while simultaneously toying with the genre of trompe l’oeil painting. In his well-known film-based paintings, he transfers entire films onto canvases by stripping the emulsion off of 16- and 35-mm celluloid prints, dissolving it in acrylic paint, then spraying the mixture onto canvas. Blurred and smoky, the resulting works improbably contain the entire film, its duration, imagery, and coded sound collapsed into a single composition—another aged technology that Zilm both breaks down and imbues with fresh possibility.