A collaborative project by George Pfau and Tom Comitta.
“Zombie” is everywhere. There’s “zombie formalism,” “zombie technology,” “zombie debt,” “zombie poetry.” If something exists, there’s a living dead version of it. Why is this? And to what effect? For years George Pfau has been exploring these questions and our culture’s fixation on zombie through painting, drawing, video and lectures. Starting with a collaborative video, also titled Zombie Variations, he began to work with poet Tom Comitta on a number of linguistic and poetic inquiries into zombie and the grotesque. These multimedia collaborations offer a glimpse into a fusion of their practices in which language, pop culture and the grotesque merge into many variations on a theme.
The Zombie Variations project began with a 15-minute video of Tom reading their co-written tongue twisters and poems. Subsequently, they developed the large-scale vinyl installation “Eight-Fields Surrounding a Village (Or a History of the Hashtag)” depicting a sequential narrative that maps zombie film tropes to the evolution of the hashtag. A number of rebus paintings by Pfau and Comitta offer deconstructed, alternative visual narratives to popular zombie movies. Additionally, they created BlabberLab, which is a dynamic tool for creating grotesque coded messages or visual poems. The variations abound.
The pair produced two books: Zombie Variations and Zombie Variations Symposium. The former displays a full catalog of collaborative drawings, text art, sound poetry scores, notes, and other images by Pfau and Comitta. Zombie Variations Symposium presents the work of six artists, poets, lawyers and scholars: Ashley Brim, Angela Hennessy, Rajkamal Kahlon, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Jonah Mixon-Webster and Joshua Warren. Their approaches to manifesto, collage, drawing and storytelling offer additional and highly nuanced approaches to “zombie” and pop culture.
Zombie Variations has been presented Alter Space in San Francisco. For more information visit zombievariations.us
Rebus painting, oil on panel
Rebus painting, oil on linen
Rebus painting, installed at Alter Space. Photo: Alter Space
Vinyl Installation, Alter Space, San Francisco. Read more at Shady Characters Photo: Alter Space
temporary tattoo
Framed Horror Font Bottoms prints on the left, Rebus Oil Painting on the right. Installed at Alter Space Photo: Alter Space
ink on paper, George and Tom alternated drawing, left to right, top to bottom
ink on paper,
Rebus painting, oil on linen
Rebus painting installed at Alter Space. Photo: Alter Space
Rebus painting, acrylic on linen
Silkscreened t-shirts, with tie-dye
Rebus painting, oil/acrylic on linen
ink on paper,
Two books:
Zombie Variations, available on Lulu
Zombie Variations Symposium, available on Lulu
This symposium extends the inquiries of George Pfau and Tom Comitta’s work on the Zombie Variations project, featuring six commissioned pieces. Sarah Juliet Lauro’s piece doubles as a unique work of creative theory and an introduction to the extensive scholarly work that has been published about “zombie.” Joshua Warren’s collage collects instances of the word “zombie” as it appears in transcripts of court cases. Angela Hennessey deconstructs the ideologies that mask and distort death. Rajkamal Kahlon describes her pieces as growing out of “nature and social implication of autopsy reports and death certificates emerging from U.S. military bases and prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Ashley Brim uses dialogue, interior monologue and allegory to confuse the irrationality so often prescribed to the swarm of anonymous zombies in films and books. Jonah Mixon-Webster expounds on the water crisis in Flint, Michigan and the atrocities that governments have committed against the citizens of Flint.
Directed by George Pfau. Featuring Tom Comitta. Written by George Pfau and Tom Comitta.
Videography: Kristina Willemse, Ben Casias Sound: Paige Goedkoop, Brett Forest