Andrew Blair Work and Artist Statement and Critique by Sharon Servilio

The ZSB Apprenticeship is named after Chryslers’ “Three Musketeers” engineering team and focuses on the path, desires and expertise in hopes of reaching the teams level of innovation. The “Three Musketeers’” drive for ambitious achievements in the automotive industry and my personal connection to Fred M. Zeder’s own drive and devolution through his daughter, my Grandmother and the spirit to understand, design and create has emerged in my own work in a way that is best described as an apprenticeship.

 ZSB 6 set the stage for how I as the Quixote attempted to reconcile the inabilities I have in explaining what I learned from my family’s prestigious history. Uniquely designed furniture pieces, sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints and hand crafted wallpaper serves as a legend to understand the rest of the Apprenticeship series. The second part of the Apprenticeship series ZSB 3 is the process an apprentice takes in learning and developing a skill.  This set represents the Quixote’s advancement, it contains still life drawings with the process still apart of the image, rubbings of printing blocks discovering a form of image making, and woodblock prints emulating strategic plans.

The ZSB Apprenticeship intertwines esoteric symbols, hierarchies, patterns, historical and pop culture references, not in the vein of an illogical fool, but one who creates a new logic from what is inside him. “A Quixote’s Apprenticeship towards ZSB” continues for why and how the world needs to be constructed so that he may understand and so he will be understood.

One of the things that strikes me in your work is a tension between two different types of worth - two different ways to measure oneself.  First, there is the internally-driven striving for greatness - the innovation and craft that's exemplified by the ZSB Chrysler engineering team.  This ideal is historically very American - the self-made person who is creating his/her identity through ambition and achievement.  This contrasts with the externally-imposed status symbols of Prada and other European designer names - measures not of any internal drive but of wealth which may or may not be earned.

That you identify with the Quixote is very interesting in this context.  Don Quixote so preferred an imagined past of chivalric knights, that he completely eschewed his present reality in order to live this fantasy.  Similarly, I think we can look back through American history with nostalgia - we can see a time when cars signified optimism and faith in the idea of limitless progress and industry.  Today, knowing the environmental and political consequences of our reliance on cars, and also knowing that the American dream is not a guaranteed birthright, it's hard to imagine a time when cynicism wasn't the norm.  As a nation we are definitely experiencing growing pains and resistance to letting go of industrial era norms and assumptions, to the point of Quixote-esque denial. I think it's quite interesting that your work acts as a personal microcosm to reflect that collective anxiety.

Here are some questions I think you'll need to grapple with as you continue this project.  To really understand the project, viewers need to know a fair amount of background and context - how are you going to convey the backstory to the viewers?  Over time, can you incorporate more of your concept into the work itself so as to be less reliant on the artist statement?  (This is something I think most artists struggle with!) What will be the scope of the project?  I could see this as an intimate dialogue between yourself and your great-grandfather, or it could grow to encompass more of your family tree, becoming one of those multi-generational family sagas.

Another challenge is that the designer names such as Prada are so laden with meaning in our culture, and I'm not sure it's always the meaning you intend.  I project a multitude of associations onto these - the frivolity of celebrities who collect a $20,000 handbag in every color of the rainbow; young status-seekers who rack up credit card debt on designer items they can't afford.  Your intent in using these symbols is a bit too vague for me. It's always a fine line between being too heavy-handed vs. too vague, but in this case the ambiguousness is distracting and I could use a bit more direction in how I should relate to these symbols.

In terms of the craft itself - I find the rubbings very beautiful but the woodcarvings/drawings intrigue me more because when your hand is present, you are forced to come to terms with your own skill level and how that measures up to the ideal you have of your great-grandfather (and surrogate grandfathers like the renaissance painters).  I would like to see the drawings become more complex/challenging - maybe taking a subject like the intricate inner gears and engines of the automobile, or doing a drawing that's actually the size of a 1920's car.   Or perhaps a subject that's not related literally to cars, but that has a level of intricacy or challenging spatial relations that will push the drawing further into the realm of your heroes.