Homepage of Zachàr Laskewicz

Welcome to the homesite of Dr Zachàr Alexander Leonid LASKEWICZ: professional unwilling eccentric

"I've come to accept that the tendency to categorise my work with a single set of meanings is a convenient and understandable way to make sense of art. I feel, however, that the dynamic process between an individual and his or her world in its creation is sometimes lost or even forgotten. With the advantages of interactive multimedia technology and the internet, I hope that I'll be able to help people understand how ideas are stimulated into core concepts which become the inspirational source for many different kinds of artistic 'product'...[more]"

My name is Zachàr Alexander Laskewicz and I was born in Western Australia in 1971 although my unusual name reflects on a largely Eastern European family history. I've been a composer, a performer, a lecturer in places as diverse as China, Finland and Belgium, where I now concentrate primarily on film-making and composing. At the moment I live in Ghent, a truly beautiful Belgian city where I am as frenetically creative as ever.

In retrospect, I've always applied my creativity to sculpt a sort of lense through which I can gaze at the world in an attempt to understand it better. I love it when people return my gaze by interacting with my work. You can do so by sending me a mail or leaving a comment where this is possible. If you've got something to say, I'm all ears!

This site contains a lot of personal property over which I maintain the ultimate copyright. I offer you it all with joy but I kindly reqest that you credit any references you make to my compositions, writings or films. Telling me about how you may have interacted with my work or this site would be an extra added bonus. My email address is zachar@nachtschimmen.eu.

27 March 2010 - Major new text above which describes a background to my work as a creative artist. It's included on the anecdotes and aphorisms page but is also considered as a first step to change my website so that it better represents who I am through the artistic processes I perform.

26 March 2010 - New thoughts added updating STATE OF THINGS page a copy of which is included in its rubric below.

24 February 2010 - Addition to Inspirations & Recollections rubric concerning the 'EVIL-I' theme included also below in rubric seven.

16 November 2009 - Quote added to Anecdotes & Aphorisms. Text above also adjusted.

26 March 2010

This rubric was originally added so that people visiting this site would get a quick slice of what is happening in my life. I haven't been at all good at keeping it up or in fact starting then. Looking below I'm embarrassed to see only one entry per year. I'd like to take this chance at last to confess what the real problem has been. In a burst of enthusiasm which probably dates around the time of the last entry, I decided to renovate my place of residence. In an almost bafflingly quick series of intense creativity I installed a mezzanine-floor, repositioned my workplace to be directed towards the process of creativity, repainted, built a set of bookcases, renovated furniture constructed an enormous eye on one of the windows, rewired everything to remote control devices at easily accessibly posts, constructed a set of artworks directed towards the street, among many other things. From that impetus, however, it has taken until only very recently to get over it. In other words, I must be the only person who has spent the last year doing little else than cleaning up. All in all, I'm lucky to be alive. As I did it all on my own without even a single bit of help my body is covered with scars; learning how to jigsaw a bathroom fixture into the right shape can really hurt if you direct it accidently through your finger. Discovering through an almost fatal fall from the mezzanine that the construction of a set of stairs needs a hand-rail taught me one of many valuable but painful lessons. There are many, many absurd and funny (but all true) stories to tell about this last year and in fact what I've done and am attempting to do, so my current emphasis is on finding a new way to present the structure of my website at a glance so that potential visitors can see not only that I do amazing things a lot of people are too scared (or too smart) to dare, but that the whole process of making mistakes and learning from them, and how this relates dynamically with how I make sense of my world through my art; how I try to get people [both real and virtual] to interact with me. I want this site to reflecf not only what I do but how I think. This involves some basic structural changes which are currently being brewed. In the homepage, in any case, each new rubric should show things I've done but also foundational concepts and ideas that may or may not develop into music-theatre compositions or films or art-works. This will not be easy; at the moment apart from a few innovations this site is basically a set of my collected works. From this week I've decided to do something about it. The first is to include a recent photo of me. This is important because the way my body changes or the way I change it can actively influence the processes I undergo in the creation of art.

From this homesite, the six major areas of my work can be viewed from various perspectives by clicking on the icons here to the left which indicate the major ways I have of interacting with the world and to help me make sense of reality: [1] music composition, [2] film design, [3] graphic art, [4] performance, and [5] writing - both fiction and non-fiction. I believe that any sort of exchange of knowledge, from musical, through conversational, to sensual, is equally valid and enriches us every day if we stand open to it. Each of these individual sub-pages has a set of 4 or 5 active links to a profile for that category, a 'complete list of works' page, among other possibilities depending on the nature of the skill - composition, for example, has a link to the music-box.

As far as seeing individual examples of my work is concerned, the 'complete list of works' pages contain a set of links to individual pages, to either listen to, watch, download, read or admire in some other way my writings, music and design. Links for the major complete lists are included below :

In addition to the five categories to the left, however, reading further will demonstrate my most recent projects, both finished and unfinished, including poetry, interesting and/or remarkable events and even anecdotes, aphorisms, recollections or other bursts of written inspiration which form as a result of the constant motion inherent in 'the incessant cycle spinning away inside my head'. Seven separate 'places' which often cohere with a particular website with all the collected set of that category, are used as points to show recent developments in my work. Therefore the bars which seperate the seven categories below also provide a link to a seperate page.

Here I try to reflect my rather ironic way of looking at things by presenting short anecdotes, recollections, aphorisms, opinions or short poems; they are taken from the page which includes a collection of all my various types of commentary and I transfer them to this page depending on mood and environment :

"Did you have one of those mothers who you're embarrassed to bring your friends home to because you're worried that she may try to chat them up or belittle you? In this regard, I was lucky. I didn't have any friends..."

"The most important relationship men develop outside the womb is the relationship they have with their language."

Here I provide links or information surrounding new works that are finished or have been recently uploaded; something that could possibly be downloaded.

I include below a link to the free ebook version which resulted from the writing of my doctoral dissertation :

More and more PDF versions of both poems, articles and scores are being printed and included as part of the web-structure. Click the link below to link directly to the PDF version of the my poem 'The House of Cards' (which includes explanatory information) :

Quick access to new musical projects and a place for me to present new compositions I'm working on for general approval - possible information about up-and-coming performances.

The link below is to a multimedia interactive presentation which presents samples of my musical compositions :

Below is an embedded playlist to the final version of the new music-theatre film that lasts in total 36 minutes - THE PAINSTAKING CYCLE ['Zvotšlipas Umatšlipas]. This film is the ultimate expression of the inability of language on its own to communicate by using the very structure of the language lesson (for a fictive language) to tell a very particular story. It is information intensive, and seeing that it is lesson 27, the intention is not that everything is understood, but one gets an impression of the meaning as the tale is told; this is the metanarrative embed within the structure of the film and the music which enfolds it.

An example of a poem (or a fragment from a poem) which suits my current state of mind.

"Painstakingly, pain's taking its
Time to punish a crime
Committed quite innocently
For free, by me...

Painstakingly,pain's taking me out to play
Yet this is a game where pain's stakes are set;
On my loss pain has bet and when the game is done
(and pain has won) I'll no longer be free
Because I'll be the one who'll depart as
Pain's takings...

Painstakingly pain's taken me just one way to stay...
Seeing I left tickets for two to ensure that you'd follow me too
With such tickets to go it's hard to say no
I think, don't you?"

In this portrait, I designed all the clothes I'm wearing; I also sewed them together. The photo was taken on December 23rd in Belgium, although my grandmother (to the left) was photographed in the middle of the year while I was in Australia; I asked her to put on some make-up and look very serious.

FREE POSTER [A3 size in pdf format for the film 'The Painstaking Cycle'. It is from a series of 10 posters all of which are on display, although only this one can be downloaded at high quality].

This space contains recent inspiration and concepts which may or may not result in the production of a finished product as well as relevant current events and/or recollections that may have some sort of signification to the way I am inspired or to the type of work I create, or on the other hand may have had an influence on forming the way I've developed as an artist.

Body sculpture or fetishisation of one of my eyes which has put me through an unbelievable amount of misery during the last years. Poking fun at modern forms of body art, I'm in the process of designing an eye-patch which attaches not via an elastic but through a centrally placed eye-brow piercing. I've already constructed a bionic eye by taking apart a camera and sticking it to bits of a pair of glasses, the design will also be central to a set of graphic art works which will appear as part of my permanent collection.

LAST MODIFIED: 2 September 2009