Chris Zickefoose

Make and Model

E1507 Summer Showcase (2026)

Curated by Dustin Kuhns

Identity is never only internal. It is a system of objects—both analog and digital—that we choose, maintain, display, and learn to desire.

Chris’s Make and Model distills this complexity into deceptively simple wall sculptures. They borrow their logic from car culture, but not as quotation or gimmick. Instead, like gems, they speak in a charged visual language cut from a familiar vocabulary. 

 

Finish, polish, labor, and ownership interrogate taste as social code—how value is assigned, how status gets performed, and how selfhood comes assembled from materials that seem external to us until they are not.

 

 

The seduction of each Polyhedron is immediate. Reflection, color, and precision reveal the textures of consumer identity and object fetish: Why does shine read as authority? Why rawness as authenticity? Why does refinement feel expensive—even moral? 

Where do the objects end and I begin? …when I get close enough, I can see myself in the finish.

 

 

About the Artist

Chris Zickefoose (b. 1992) makes wall mounted sculptures that are meditations on materials and their broader social implications.

He grew up in Harford County, Maryland. He learned woodworking at a young age from his grandfather and took to art through skateboarding and punk music.

He attended Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA, 2014) where he developed his first major body of work, The OSB series. His studio practice continued in the Baltimore/DC area while he worked as an art handler in museums.

He attended the Vermont Studio Center Residency (2016) and started using found building materials to construct assemblages. His process was refined at The Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency (JTHAR, 2018) where he used the weathered surfaces of demolished homesteads in the Mojave to highlight the synthesis of what is man made and what is naturally occurring. After JTHAR he moved to Los Angeles and began developing his latest Polyhedron series.

In addition to making sculpture, he is a surfer, musician and card shark.