Zak Tilley's Art Residency in Mexico

Casa Lü Parque, located in Ciudad de los Deportes just south of Roma and Condesa, offered a rare mix of structure and openness. The house itself is a beautiful example of mid-century Mexican architecture: brutalist, minimal, and tucked within a quiet compound that felt distinctly apart from the density of the city. That separation shaped how I worked. The physical calm of the house made space for conceptual risk, allowing me to approach making with more attentiveness and less urgency.

The residency gave me time to test ideas without the usual pressure to produce outcomes. That slower pace helped ground some of the more abstract lines of inquiry in my practice. I was able to step back from production and spend time thinking critically about how the work functions across registers of actuality, reality, and virtuality. The distinction between what is materially present, what is socially or culturally perceived, and what exists in the speculative or imagined became more central to how I understand the work’s relationship to belief and perception.

Working closely with Professor Xaus Kahal was one of the most generative parts of the experience. His thinking, rooted in philosophy, cultural studies, and art history, brought a level of conceptual rigour that helped sharpen how I approach image-making. Our conversations opened up new frameworks for thinking about the relationship between language, narrative, and the construction of meaning. They pushed me to question the epistemological assumptions behind the visual forms I use.

My practice is grounded in a kind of personal archaeology. I use painting and sculpture to examine the overlaps between belief, perception, and place, especially within the contexts of queerness and inherited mythologies. I am interested in the ways these systems inform what we take to be true, and how the unseen or unverifiable can still have real agency. The work often shifts between what is present, what is suggested, and what is imagined.

 

My time at Casa Lü marked a shift in my material practice. I began developing sculptural works alongside painting for the first time in a serious way. This came out of ongoing research into big cat sightings in Australia, where I’ve been using landscape painting to respond to individual testimonies. Rather than treating the landscape as a passive setting, I’m exploring it as a kind of witness — capable of holding memory, projection, and fear. The paintings are based on real accounts, but they resist illustration. They sit somewhere between belief and doubt.

 

Sculpture has entered the work as a way to hold presence differently. It allows me to build forms that are not tied to representation but still carry affect and meaning. In the context of these sightings — where there is no proof, only stories — sculpture lets me explore what it means to give shape to something that is unseen but still felt."