William Mazza is a Brooklyn-based visual artist centered in community-based 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, printed texts, music, and dance into visual representations. Less direct expressions include ephemera or artifacts generated from projected durational painting, or from projecting ive painting mixed with custom video and animation during improvised, collaborative, interdisciplinary performances—most often with a mix of musicians, dancers, and poets.
Collaboration also finds expression in short- or long-term engagement with community-based arts organizations including The Belladonna* Collaborative, the interdisciplinary producer 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.