Artist Statement

Zach Valent is an Interdisciplinary visual artist who creates objects and installations that are encouraged by his fascination of growth and time. His work incorporates a multitude of skills ranging from mold making and casting concrete, metal fabrication and woodworking, as well experimental and chemical processes. Through creative exploration of materials and the introduction of chemical growth, Valent seeks to impose a much broader spectrum of time than just the now. By combining motifs of geological development with modern day imagery that is destined to vanish over time, Valant’s work simultaneously explores the past, present and the future.

Bio

A couple of hours south of Chicago where the Illinois River widens to a measured two and a half miles, lies the quaint river city of Peoria, Illinois. This blue-collar city with a healthy appetite for art, music and literature is ripe with creative culture and is the birthplace of Zach Valent. Having grown up by simple means, his earliest artworks were created with household and recycled items. On countless occasions his parents returned home to find that he had transformed entire rooms into sprawling maze-like installations with nothing more than a large ball of string, or to find the back yard littered with large structures constructed from scrap wood and rope.

In 2014 after completing a BFA at Southern Illinois University Carbondale located in the Shawnee National Forest, Valent ventured to the Sonoran Desert to pursue a Masters of Fine Arts Degree and to fulfill a lifelong dream of exploring the southwest. Since relocating to Tempe, Arizona, Valent has excelled beyond his imagination in not only his academic career at Arizona State University but also as a professional artist. In the summer of 2016 he returned from a six-week digital stone-carving residency in Italy, ready to begin development on his MFA thesis titled Antiquarium of Change; which was successfully installed in April of 2017. Valant’s work has been admired, exhibited and collected both nationally and internationally.