ARTIST BIOGRAPHY:
Zach Brown's paintings combine traditional techniques and materials with formal design. The work puts the illusion of representational painting against the reality of the material and the painting as an object. This duality is also seen in the mixing of contemporary and ancient subject matter found in his work. The visual themes focus on the subjects of history, myth, and mortality. Zach Brown was born and raised in the small town of Mars Pennsylvania. After high school he attended the Rhode Island School of Design where he received his BFA. Zach went on to earn his MFA from the New York Academy of Art. After school Zach was awarded the Eric Fischl residency where he continued to develop his studio practice. He currently lives and works in Pittsburgh where he runs The School House art space.

ARTIST STATEMENT:
An old man returned from the desert. He was wide-eyed, spit hanging from his chin. He said the sky had split open and a seed descended through the rupture. Strange men were birthed from the seed. The old man foamed at the mouth, warning of the approaching strangers. What would these strangers bring?

When Indigenous peoples first saw the sails of Spanish ships, they mistook them for strange waves. They fetched a shaman, the only one able to decipher what they were seeing. The strange waves were boats. Boats bringing death and submission. The world they knew no longer existed, though they did not yet understand it.

God is dead. We are too knowledgeable, too comfortable in our physical grip on reality. The recurring images of the UFO phenomenon must therefore be either unknown Spanish ships or the product of Ebonizer Scrooge’s undigested beef. But what, then, is descending from the skies? What is being witnessed?

Among those who speculate about the phenomenon, there is a predictable pattern of response. Some lean into conspiracy: the government knows everything and is telling us nothing. Such thinking can be found in Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse. Others react with terror and repulsion, as outlined in the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. Still others welcome the phenomenon with the blank stare of Marshall Applewhite.

I am not concerned with conspiracies surrounding literal alien craft, nor with fears of invasion, nor with the optimism of Pleiadians descending to save humanity and usher in a new spiritual age. What interests me, as an artist, is the power of images and symbols that recur and penetrate both dreams and waking life.

In Carl Jung’s 1958 book Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Jung is unconcerned with proving whether flying saucers physically exist. His subject is psychological: why modern people became fascinated with this particular phenomenon after World War II — after the bomb, after the dawn of the nuclear age. Jung treats UFO sightings as a modern myth emerging from collective anxiety, spiritual dislocation, and the unconscious imagination of the postwar world.

God is dead. Any new visions must therefore appear scientific: spaceships, aliens, visitors from distant galaxies. No angels or demons remain for modern man.

Jung argues that modern secular society weakened traditional religious frameworks, but the psychological need for transcendence remained. As a result, spiritual energies migrated into new symbolic systems. Gone are the suns, wheels, eyes, divine discs, celestial chariots, halos, cosmic eggs, mandalas, angels, and demons. In their place are UFOs, extraterrestrials, conspiracy narratives, and myths of technological salvation.
Similarly, after World War II, artists moved away from explicitly divine imagery, replacing it with cosmic forms, alien anatomies, geometric abstraction, transcendental symbolism, machine mysticism, and chemical psychedelic visions.

The artistic process itself did not change. Something still emerged from the ether, compelling the artist to give it shape and form — to pull it into the physical world. Its origins, however, were now understood as psychological and sociological rather than divine.

It seems that humanity creates symbolic images during moments of collective crisis. The modern anxieties surrounding artificial intelligence, immigration, war, climate collapse, and social fragmentation have once again brought UFO imagery into the public imagination.

The question is whether these symbols represent salvation or destruction?