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February 4, 2005
In the forest and on the sea
Joe Ziner refers to Zack exhibit as a tribute to his father Zeke's
career.
SIMA ELIZABETH SHEFRIN
Joe Ziner is a down-to-earth kind of guy, straightforward and unpretentious.
He wears a number of hats but, in each of them – shake-splitter,
commercial fisherman, fiddler, printmaker, sculptor – he works
with his hands. I didn't know this about him when I first walked
into the exhibit From Veliki Bubni to Vancouver Island but from
my first glance at the art, that's the guess I would have made.
The work isn't all Joe's. In fact, his name appears on only eight
of the 38 pieces in the exhibit. The rest are credited to his father,
Zeke Ziner, and as Joe and I spoke, I realized that he was doing
this exhibit to honor his 85-year-old father's career.
"My father was never one for self-promotion," Joe told
me. "He went into commercial art to make a living." Nevertheless,
according to the artists' statements, Zeke has exhibited at the
Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York, among other prestigious
locations. His work is in the permanent collection of the Art Institute
of Chicago and Yale University. Zeke himself estimates that he has
produced more than 5,000 pieces. Not bad, for someone doing a bit
of art on the side.
Joe loves telling stories about his father. In 1937, Zeke spent
a year in Mexico. He purchased a burro for two dollars and travelled
to the studios of Mexican artists, including Diego Rivera, hoping
he could work with him. But Rivera sent him away, refusing to work
with an American.
Joe's story, too, as it emerges in bits and pieces during the interview,
is not without richness. He grew up in Chicago in the 1950s. As
we stand in front of "The Violinist," a beautiful print
in which musician and instrument seem almost as one, Joe casually
mentions that the Chicago String Quartet used to practise in his
living room. "My dad would do studies and bring them tea."
Joe attended the Vancouver College of Art before setting out into
the wilderness. He spent five years on Thurlow Island, leaving only
as the first logging trucks arrived. In his woodcut print "Overview,"
he depicts himself having a last look at the island where, in his
words, he'd "had the privilege of spending five non-industrialized
winters."
Joe's work is defined by his time in the forest and on the sea.
As a shake-splitter, he worked a lot with red cedar, a material
not usually used for wood blocks because it's so soft.
"Red cedar," he explained, "embodies a kind of plant
intelligence that I was always fascinated by. After studying this
wood for six or seven years, I sent the best piece to my dad and
he taught me something new."
Zeke's technique was to press down the soft spring wood of the cedar
rings with a stainless steel phonograph needle. "Eine Kline
Knacht Musik," a depiction of old cars on Vancouver Island,
is done using this technique.
The exhibit includes stainless steel sculptures, mostly Zeke's,
a large number of wood and lino prints and a fish print. Several
of the sculptures are created from metal scraps. "We frequented
industrial scrap yards and found shapes and welded them together,"
said Joe.
Joe is rightly proud of the craftsmanship in this show. When I asked
him about Zeke's Veliki Bubni series, the portraits of forgotten
ancestors from the shtetl, he said, "These people may be my
ancestors. They may have come from Veliki Bubni, although we couldn't
find it in the atlas. In fact, because we couldn't find it, it's
the perfect place for imaginary ancestors to come from. The pieces
are about family misery, getting kicked out of your own land, being
in your own land."
When Joe started talking about the printing techniques, his face
glowed with real enthusiasm. The wood and lino blocks are cut with
tools ranging from a simple gouge to a dentist's drill, and the
different tools create different effects in the wood. Grim as the
faces are, there are bits of subtle humor, like a fragment of gold
leaf on the tooth of one of the characters.
But clearly the piece Joe is most proud of is his book, The Dinghy.
It is a hand-printed artist's book in an edition of 36 copies, bound
with the Japanese technique of pages folded back into the spine.
The story is a simple one, taken from his Thurlow Island journals.
It is the tale of a trip across the lake in a storm and the next
day's return when the water was so smooth he "fancied water
nymphs carried me across." The illustrations are a delightful
virtuoso of printing techniques, including woodcuts in cherry, birch
and cedar, with the text hand-set in lead type. The Dinghy
is in special collections at McGill University and in the British
Library in London.
From Veliki Bubni to Vancouver Island, Prints and Sculpture by Zeke
and Joe Ziner, is on display at the Sidney and Gertrude Zack Gallery
until Feb. 16. Call 604-257-5111 for hours.
Sima Elizabeth Shefrin is the artist/co-ordinator of the
Middle East Peace Quilt, which has been touring North America since
1999. She is currently illustrating a children's book.
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