ZAZA NAYLOR
Artist Zaza Naylor (it/its) is keen on exploring isolation as a human condition of estrangement, an alluring, metaphysical distance between binary individuations like “I” and “you.” Its exhibitions encircling verdant spaces reveal a passionate interest in exploring the aesthetic, social, political, and personal concerns around landscape. Referent Destabilizer and other works ask audiences to engage with, rather than imagine themselves as separate from, environments they inhabit. Zaza’s “lawns” invite us to explore these green spaces in intimate context, to understand the social and relational dimensions of supposedly ordinary architectural landmarks.
Zaza’s conceptualizations of the lawn place linguistic emphasis on the truth of landscape as both noun and verb. Its desire traces lines to elevate the lawn to action, to dual states of “being” and “doing,” even as its remarkable multimedia performances trouble notions of binarism. Signs posting “GET OFF MY LAWN!” are abandoned for an invitation to the transformative.
Jonathan Cane’s Civilising Grass, a text inspiring Zaza, stands as a powerful critique of “the lawn” and its supposed innocence. Cane poses a radical question: how can our understanding of the lawn be simple or one-dimensional if lawns “suck up scarce water, consume chemicals, displace indigenous plants, and are part of a colonial lineage of dispossession and violence[?]” While the author demands readers imagine the desires of the lawn, its wish to be ignored or watered, admired or fretted over, Zaza as an artist posits “the lawn” as an ultimate truth of stagnation, a space that inhibits growth, movement and transformation.
Zaza toils in the spirit of meticulous care as it performs with the changing lawn. This gradual slowing of pace is healing—it troubles the hegemonic. Discarded, unwanted, and illegible, the artist’s “objects” range from found plastic bags and clipped grass to elements of its body like hair. Green spaces become dialogues exploring thought-provoking, social relationships between architectural forms like the lawn and deep human feelings like isolation. Aesthetic, social, and political problems end up converging in Zaza’s reveries on the lawn and its bold artistic performances and installations.
— Sterling Nix II, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Student
EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION BY SAM LO, OSU MFA PHOTOGRAPHY 2026