If you live in New York, you’ve probably walked past some of Dave Zackin’s designs while high.
As creative director for the New York Regional Plan Association, Zackin has designed New York City’s public space recycling bins and educational recycling stickers. The graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design holds a bachelor’s degree in animation and a master’s degree in both public health and urban studies.
His work has been featured on hundreds of public information posters throughout the city, but the artist has also gained notoriety for his ceramic pottery, which has garnered him over 100,000 Instagram followers.
Zackin takes discarded pots and clay pieces from Gasworks NYC, the community studio where he creates, and gives them new life and purpose. His creative process begins with raiding the studio for a starting point.
He wraps unfired pottery in wet rags to rehydrate before sculpting over the top of the piece. If it’s already been cooked and the shape is locked in, Zackin paints messages and designs in glaze. These range from a plate proclaiming, “I will eat all of my enemies,” to a candy bowl reading, “one of these candies is poisoned, but the rest are delicious.” Zackin calls these his “good-bad ideas.” This is where he said Cannabis comes in.
“I try to empty my head and come up with some ideas that seem like they’re coming from the outside of the world and looking in,” Zackin said. He went on to add that “pot really helps with this.”
Zackin experimented with Cannabis throughout junior high, high school and college, but it wasn’t until he spent a year dating a medical cannabis patient that he started smoking on the regular.
Nowadays, though he still smokes a few times a week, he considers himself a lightweight. “Two hits off a vape pen does the trick for me,” he said.
For making ceramics, Zackin explained that it is best to smoke only a little bit before hitting the studio.
“If I smoke too much, I get obsessed with surface patterns and spend a lot of time doing what we refer to in the ceramic studio as ‘cat licking’ — adjusting tiny details on a pretty much completed piece,” Zackin said.
Since Gasworks NYC is a shared studio space, Zackin mostly gossips with friends while creating. Many artists lock themselves away in the studio, toiling away alone, but he prefers the energy of having people there to interact with while he works.
“We also listen to Lower Dens, Stevie Wonder and whatever someone who connects to the Bluetooth speaker starts playing,” he shared. “Sometimes people sing.”
Staring at Zackin’s finished ceramics, I get a sort of Will-Vinton-claymation vibe, with characters that seem to bubble up and come to life from their clay origins. Sometimes they feature a muppet-like face and arms, or a cup with kind features and large ears.
When asked how he comes up with daily ideas, Zackin said, “Using other people’s leftovers as a starting point allows me to make a lot of work really quickly and not feel too precious about each piece.”
The process, he revealed, becomes much easier after a couple of hits.
