The gym is a place where everyday antics—sexuality, competitiveness (within and between the sexes), ego, and primal behaviors—are amplified in a stagelike environment where there is a hyperawareness of bodies in a public space. Engaging the politics of looking through both male and female gazes, we sneak glimpses of others in mirrors and through makeshift windows in gym equipment.

When considering the omnipresence of screens, it is clear that screen time is as much an integrated part of life as a form of escape from it. We are required to maintain a split consciousness between screens and physical space. My recent paintings feature images of NFL broadcasts, which combine the unpredictability of live television with the emotional investment of sports fanaticism, perhaps the last stronghold of television as a real-time shared event or collective experience.

My work is a response to the surrounding landscape. From the beginning, I’ve been influenced, both knowingly and unknowingly, by its designs, color, and lines. What drives the work is my desire to create a sense of tension and space. Thinly layered color and geometric forms work to achieve this. As with a lingering memory, I am constantly reworking and reinterpreting what I see. A sense of history is always present.

My recent works are tied up in painterly romanticism, while trying to eschew all of it. Paint is substituted for charcoal and water. Space is relegated to the distance between me and the wall. Touch is limited to the smashing and scraping of dust. Figuration is used only for depicting stomachaches, energy drinks, and skepticism.

Since I continue to discover profound parts in each painting I make, I question if a painting can ever be complete. In positioning my work in the world, I accept past failures with the hope of success in the present and future. I read into my work by looking at it. I instinctively connect to feelings of intensity, tension, and contact. In my work, the physicality of the paint collides with the comfort of illusion.

Each of Zappitell’s paintings is a long journey of gestures. Completely filling canvases or panels with innumerable layers of deliberate, vigorous brushstrokes, she shares an affinity with abstract expressionists such as Joan Mitchell and Willem de Kooning. However, her paintings are fully informed by her life experiences—from being a wife and mother to traveling the world to the meditation practice of finding the pause. The colors she selects subconsciously reflect these experiences, such as the glowing oranges and reds that followed a trip to Africa.

My paintings depict hybridized spaces in vivid colors, alternately fragmenting and coalescing. I consider play and discovery important components of both the execution of the painting and the viewer’s experience with it. I position my viewer as an explorer and navigator roaming through various spaces coexistent within a single composition, addressing the potential for fluidity between the material and the virtual.

The pieces in High Lonesome arose while I was working on another series. Using charcoal, charcoal powder, archival tape, paper, and various ephemera, I noticed how the oils from my hands left unique marks on the paper, how I made minor scratches in the substrate as I moved my hands and tools, how the torn and cut tape pieces were in dialogue with each other, and how the color differences between the paper or Claybord interacted with the charcoal powder and artist’s tape. I saw a quiet beauty in these occurrences, so I decided to dedicate an entire series to them.

My work embraces Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopias: sites that mirror, distort, and invert other spaces. The painted gestures nod to the mindfulness of the human mark within a space reminiscent of the void in Asian landscape painting. The gestures bear the uniform of regional textile designs, referring to a worldwide textile trade that for centuries has been a complicated narrative of migration, hierarchy, and power. This trade assigned the “East” with exotic mystery and identified it significantly as “the other.” The nonverbal aesthetics of textiles transcends