Artist Bio

Zach (Z) Shubert is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Philadelphia. Their work explores the complexities of identity via self portraiture. Shubert investigates how identity is synthesized in an intimate personal setting but is perpetually re-contextualized by an ever-changing environment. Themes of desire, gender expression, and mental health are prevalent in the work and encourage more nuanced explorations of identity.

Z’s emphasis on series and multiple iterations of the same image is rooted in their printmaking background and prioritizes the need to disseminate information to the community. This way of making also lends itself to the investigation of how media is consumed in our society, and how that effects the individual and their sense of internalized identity. Z’s use of the clown/harlequin motif situates the work in the history of such characters in the Western European theatre tradition, as well as an alludes to the antihero of today’s popular culture.

Shubert’s work is in the liminal space of questioning the integrity of a deeply personal intersectional self-identity through intimate reflection, and demanding that identity be acknowledged and respected in it’s immensity by a society that demands rigorous categorization of self and often reinforces the simplification of the self.