William Mazza is a Brooklyn-based visual artist centered in community-based and collaborative arts with a focus on art-making as a form of popular communication. Exploiting chance operation, collaboration, accumulation, and duration across studio and performative practices, the artist documents the spatial and temporal relationships of people to their environments, scribing a cartography which maps the conceptual boundaries of lived experience.
The most material expressions of this project are drawings and paintings created by translating subjects such as inhabited environments, intervals of dislocation, television and film, music and dance, or printed texts, into visual representations. Less direct expressions include ephemera or artifacts generated from projected durational paintings, or from mixing video and animated loops with live digital painting into projections during improvised, collaborative, interdisciplinary performances--most often with a mix of musicians, dancers, and poets.
Collaboration has also found expression in short- or long-term engagement with community-based arts organizations including The Belladonna* Collaborative, and Arts for Art / Vision Festival, and the Matzo Files (a flat file gallery) in NYC, or the update artist collective Altered Space Community Arts (Syracuse, NY), and the artist cooperative State of the Art Gallery (Ithaca, NY). These experiences not only expand the definition of cultural work from the individual outward in practice, they also manifest in unexpected opportunities to collaborate across disciplines, inspiring and enriching the solo practice through a practical symbiosis.