Video projection still from Graduate Art alumnus Michael Zahn’s (MFA 14) thesis show Madita.

Every artist has a muse: F. Scott Fitzgerald had Zelda; Coco Chanel had Etienne Balsan; and John Waters had…Divine.

For a more contemporary example, look no further than the cover of Art Center’s recently published Graduate Studies Viewbook. It’s there, underneath the diecut lettering, where you’ll find an image of a bright green alginate cast of a human hand.

That hand belongs to, and was one element of, Graduate Art alumnus Michael Zahn’s (MFA 14) thesis show Madita, which was inspired by someone he met as a foreign exchange student at Kunsthochschule Weissensee in Berlin.

Alginate cast of Zahn’s hand from Madita.

“I was there as an art student, so I was supposed to be making work, but it seemed silly to be in Berlin holed up inside a studio,” says Zahn, explaining how his drive for studying in the German capital was to soak up a foreign culture. “I wanted to be outside and experiencing Berlin’s social life.”

It was that drive that led him to center his Berlin-inspired work around the act of observation. Hence another element of his thesis show, a pair of DIY binoculars he made in Berlin that, when used, cast everything in a subtle pink and yellow glow.

“That was my tourist art,” says Zahn with a laugh. “I carried them around with me and used them to bring some California sunshine to Berlin.”

Focusing on the act of observation also gave him an excuse to shift his attention to an individual he had become enamored with, a woman named Madita.

“She was very striking in a way that I can’t quite explain,” says Zahn, when describing Madita, a fellow art student who began studying at Weissensee, who moved into a nearby studio just a few days before it was time for Zahn to head back to Pasadena.

Zahn’s Sightseeing Goggles were part of his Madita show.

Zahn recalls being drawn to “her androgyny, her haircut, the color of her skin” and needed some kind of excuse to interact with her. He found an opportunity when he spotted, right next to her studio, a tray filled with a bright green liquid—the remnants of a plant, discarded by another artist, which had rotted during the hot summer months.

He approached Madita and asked her if she’d be willing to place her hands inside the tray for a video project he was working on. “For some reason I thought she would like this substance,” says Zahn, who was pleased his intuition was correct. “You can just tell that some people like to get their hands dirty.”

The five-minute video he shot of Madita first exploring and then eventually submerging her hand in the liquid, seemed like an important moment to Zahn, particularly since he knew they would only have a few days together. That moment, and an attempt to remember both it and Madita herself, became the inspiration for Zahn’s thesis show, which included, among other things, the aforementioned alginate cast of his hand, a large wax sculpture of a hand covered with a green swamp-like residue (“a murky ecosystem of goop”), and video projections of Skype calls that Zahn had with Madita after parting ways.

A wax sculpture of a hand, the centerpiece of Zahn’s Madita show.

“I went back and forth between thinking of it as a love letter directly for her and as something for me to color and elaborate on my memories of her,” he says of the show. “I think it’s something in between, like a portrait of my desire for her.”

With two hands in the show, one being the alginate cast of Zahn’s hand, it’s easy to speculate that the other larger-than-life sculpture on a pedestal represents Madita.

“No, I don’t think of that wax hand as belonging to her,” says Zahn. “It’s funny to think of it as a self portrait. But rather than the hand, I’m that goop taking on the form of a hand. It’s like a weird way to beam across the Atlantic and touch her.”