June 29 | 12-3:30pm | Purchase your tickets
Join artist Zac Banik for a lesson in visible mending techniques (including darning, patching, and felting) accompanied by study and discussion of the spiritual potential of brokenness, how to wear our scars with purpose, and what it means to repair the world. Visible mending is a philosophy of repair that makes beauty from rips and tears, rebuilding a garment with creative and new qualities rather than attempting to hide its imperfections. While we repair our own clothes, we can take the opportunity to imagine how a similar technique can be applied to our own lives, communities, and the world at large. Please bring a damaged garment that needs repair. Tools and materials will be provided.
This program is offered as part of Co/Lab’s Art+Judaism+Spirit Workshop Series featuring Art/Lab alumni.
Listen to this podcast to learn more about the artist before the workshop begins.
Zac Banik is a Slavic-American Jew who makes new things out of old things. He believes that difference is worth celebrating and tradition is worth remembering. He wants to bring people together, repair what is broken and put a smudge on every clean surface.
Zac works in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, drawing, painting, textiles and narrative object design. He describes his aesthetic style as folk-modernism, combining the radical formal explorations of the early 1900’s with the deeply human signs, symbols and evidence of the creator’s hand preserved in folk craft. His interests lie in neo-Hasidism, solar punk, practical utopianism, Adlerian psychology, speculative ethnography and the social model of disability recovery. He has worked as a musician, an artist and designer, a teacher, a mental health worker, a sewist, an entrepreneur, a farm hand, a writer, an arts administrator and, briefly, in accounts receivable. Zac is a member of Gallery 114 in Portland, Oregon. More can be found on his website.