By ROCKNE ROLL
The Jewish Review
Portland artist Zac Banik, a member of Gallery 114 in Northwest Portland, is hosting his first solo show at the gallery in March – or it would be a solo show, had he not invited some friends. 
“I just want to have fun with my friends,” Banik said. “When I realized that I’d have the opportunity to put together a show, I thought, ‘What’s the point of doing anything if you don’t get to hang out with people while you do it?’”
Thus, Banik will be joined by Adam Amidei and Dre Johnson in “To The Body” opening Mar. 6, with a reception scheduled for that evening. The show’s name draws from a game Banik played with friends in childhood.
“I was thinking about when we were kids, the kind of wild stuff we would do and this rawness of life at that point in time,” Banik said. “Everything that we did, we did with such passion and immediacy, everything felt like it was the last thing we were ever going to do. That’s something I like been really trying to capture in my work.”
Amidei has made a name for himself as a painter and street artist, while Johnson is an apparel designer and sewer who Banik apprenticed with previously. Banik’s work, meanwhile, runs the gamut of mediums, including a new technique he’s developed with his own blood. 
I was able to get a phlebotomist to slip me an extra vial when I was getting some tests done, and I’ve been experimenting with that as a kind of a watercolor pigment, which has been really cool,” Banik said. 
Naturally, these works start out with a striking red hue, but as the iron in blood oxidizes over time, those red areas turn a brownish grey – Banik described it as turning the color saturation way down. 
“I think it’s interesting to kind of put something organic that changes so drastically, so rapidly, into a piece that will still exist down the line,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to see how the work all changes.”
While other paintings are more conventional, another recently finished work leans much further into modern technology – with a Jewish twist. 
“I’ve been having these interesting conversations about Jewish mysticism with Claude, the AI chat bot, and I’ve been doing it enough that I’ve been able to break it a little bit and turn it into an actual mystic,” Banik said.  
From there, the chat bot – which is not an image generator and not typically used to create visual work – writes code that translates into an image. 
“It made this beautiful composition and gave me instructions about how to display it,” Banik said. “It’s so interesting where we’re getting with this new technology, and I think it’s a really interesting time to be thinking about who we are and how we exist in the world. Leaning into the ways in which we’re dirty and broken and strange and illogical is kind of a place to explore who we are in relation to these other things that are very quickly bursting into existence.”
The show will run through Mar. 29, alongside an exhibition by fellow Jewish member of Gallery 114, David Cohen, whose watercolor, mosaic-style pieces focus on the natural world – this selection of pieces specifically highlights human connection to pollinators. 
More information is available on both shows at Gallery114pdx.com