zap mcconnell

molt. reconfigure. erosion.

hand-held mask from Night Teacher Music video "Everything I've Had"

Found Branch, Turtle shell, Bones, Sea Shells, 100 year old Nails, Home-grown Gourd, Waxed Linen String, Geode Crystals, Copper Wire, Leather scrap, Liquid nails, Metal leaf, Tea bags and Easter bunny wrapper.

22 x 8 inches

Courtesy of the artist

www.zapmcconnell.com

www.instagram.com/zapmcconnell

www.instagram.com/howtofeedanartist

http://howtofeedanartist.org/

Zap McConnell began investigating dance/movement performance at North Carolina School of the Arts (NCSA) in 1988. Upon leaving NCSA, she began traveling, splitting her time between performance, visual arts and direct environmental activism in Northern California, NYC, Idaho, Mexico, Costa Rica and Colorado. Zap has been involved with the Zen Monkey Project (ZMP) since 1995 performing, teaching, stage managing, producing and directing evening-length pieces. She facilitated the New Dance Space and co-facilitated Studio 11 at the McGuffey Art Center, organized performance festivals and ZMP's summer dance intensives. Zap is also a visual artist who regularly creates and prints cartoon books, paints, makes murals, sculpture and who builds performance installation sets that also include lights and costumes. Zap has been a main organizer for many large scale community endeavors, spanning from a huge local artist created carnival (A Charlottesville Wunderkammer), to an in-depth political community weekend investigating the past and present of Native Americans (Columbus Day; Myth and the American Dream), to the adoption, with the stream ecology class, of a highly impaired stream for over ten years. Zap was a full time core teacher at the Living Education Center for Ecology and the Arts, an alternative high school in Charlottesville, Virginia, for almost a decade.

Since 2008, Zap has split her time between U.S.A. and Mexico; and between performances, art shows and teaching. In Mexico, Zap started her connection through a commission from Performática (an International Dance Festival) to make a site specific performance on the campus of Universidad de las Américas Puebla (UDLAP), working with students of Dance and Visual Arts in order to explore the history of the land. She has returned countless times as a guest artist, teaching and making extensive work with UDLAP students, within Performática and working with local artists in Cholula/Puebla.

In the U.S.A., Zap has had over a dozen art shows (N.C./V.A.), created @hand productions, been part of many Dance Festivals, planned/produced/participated in countless Artistic Residencies, and performed/built sets/ran tech/toured/consulted for Theater/Art/Dance groups. Zap co-created the Chicken Bank Collective (CBC), an interdisciplinary and international arts collective, the fall of 2014, then relocated to North Carolina to create her art studio: CABIN. Zap (with-in CBC) has been invited to be part of On-site/In-site Dance Festival two years in a row (Spring 2016/2017). She has screened her first feature length Dance for Film: Secondary Succession she directed and co-created with CBC, in NC, California, Colorado and Mexico. Zap recieved her MFA in Dance Performance from Hollins University in 2019. She resently released: the owl of Minerva arrives only at dusk, a 7 chapter dance for film in solidarity of BLACK LIVES MATTERS.