NYAB Event - Bryan Zanisnik “Meadowlands Picaresque”

Bryan Zanisnik “Meadowlands Picaresque”

Smack Mellon

This event has ended.

“Meadowlands Picaresque” (2013) is a site-specific installation that incorporates materials from my childhood home, a polluted swamp in northern New Jersey and suburban junk shops. These objects appear en masse alongside street detritus, cardboard, dirt and objects fabricated in the studio. While the installation references a domestic interior, the plethora of childhood artifacts and props used in my previous performances creates a psychological space that functions as a constantly updating memory-archive. The work is periodically activated by a weekly performance by my parents, Bob and Carol Zanisnik and myself. The performance is essentially still, referencing both the history of the tableau vivant and the blurred boundaries between still images and live events. Just as the performance and installation exists as a live image drawn from personal archives, the documentation of Meadowlands Picaresque will ultimately generate new images for future archives.

Opposite the site-specific installation is a large-scale photograph titled “Life on Mars” (2013). The photograph is of a set constructed in my studio that recontextualizes many of the objects found in the installation. Styrofoam balls, shelves of white tchotchkes and x-rays of my broken hand commingle with mirrors, wallpapers and black lace. The photograph and its shrine-like arrangement of objects suggests a medieval reliquary while also functioning as a window unto the site-specific work.

Bryan Zanisnik was born in Union, New Jersey and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received an MFA from Hunter College and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has recently exhibited and performed in New York at MoMA PS1, Sculpture Center, and the Queens Museum of Art; in Philadelphia at the Fabric Workshop and Museum; in Miami at the De La Cruz Collection; in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Photography; in Los Angeles at LAXART; and internationally at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna and the Futura Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. Zanisnik’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, ARTnews, Modern Painters, and Time Out New York, amongst others. He has completed residencies at the Macdowell Colony, the Art Omi International Artists Residency, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, and the Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou, China. Currently he is an artist in residence at the Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY.