In collaboration with Naomi Even-Aberle, 2025

Digital scoreboard, sports net, modified flip scoreboard, soft sculpture, rolling cart

​​​

Level the Playing Field is a large-scale installation that reimagines the familiar landscape of sport as a site of disorientation, critique, and resistance. Blending Zimchek’s interest in the absurdities of constructed systems with Even-Aberle’s interrogation of power and physicality, the work exposes how rules—both written and implied—shape participation, access, and authority.

 

A stripped-down basketball court becomes the battleground for ambiguous directives and broken tools. A glowing digital scoreboard issues cryptic commands—“Players Switch Sides,” “Time Out”—while an imposing red net restricts access to the very source of instruction. Across the court, a flip scoreboard offers no clarity, filled with illegible symbols and abstract forms that refuse resolution.

 

The soft, dysfunctional sporting equipment—stitched from drop cloths and thread—further undermines the illusion of fair play, calling into question for whom the game was designed, and who is allowed to succeed within it. Playful yet pointed, the work invites viewers to navigate a game where the rules are inconsistent and the tools unreliable, a reflection of the broader systems that define power, identity, and belonging in society. Level the Playing Field asks: what happens when the systems we trust to be fair reveal themselves to be anything but?