Zachary D. Milder
Lines
301 Smithfield Street, Pittsburgh, PA
July 23 - August 16, 2026
Opening Reception Thursday, July 23rd, from 6 - 9 PM
Skypomp is pleased to present Lines, an installation and performance by New York-based artist Zachary D. Milder. This multisensory experience represents the inception of what Milder calls Nouveau Spauxrt, as he toggles the art world's attention between moments of fuzzy obfuscation and hyper-micro-focus through the lens of athletic competition.
In his works on paper Milder often uses “sport coding,” the semiotics and visual language of sports, to produce paradoxically serious and whimsical compositions as a means of confounding, complicating, and inverting our understandings of objects and spaces typically sacrosanct to often self-serious ethos of the art world. Bright, contrasting colors, lines, arcs and symbols distinguish zones of play from those considered out of bounds. The installation component of Lines continues this exploration of boundaries and purpose, while the performance aspect broaches questions of rivalry, authority, and perseverance. The competitors lunge, bend, twist, arch, pant, gasp, and sweat laying bare the essence of bodies challenging the limits of physicality, restrained by the rules of the game. The competitors jockey and dance.
Operating similarly to pieces by artists like Paul Pfeiffer, David Hammons, and Matthew Barney, Zachary D. Milder's Lines, like his other Nouveau Spauxrt paintings and installations, engages the trappings of athleticism to address issues that extend into and beyond fields, courts, and arenas of play. Milder says, “The piece is an enactment of sport, but not really about sport; it's about something deeper in the human condition.” Lines aims the spectator’s gaze into the world of sport as a warped reflection of the art world, its strata of symbolism, insistence on particular decorum, and its mechanisms designed to harness the energy of frenetic human impulses. Sport and art are cultural analogues, if not singularly homologous. In both theaters one must determine the nature of opposition, what the rules are, and what it takes to win. What is the goal? To the victor go the spoils, but what does it mean to play?