Category: sculpture

“Hedonistic Treadmill” at Underdonk

Brian Zegeer

The term, “Hedonistic Treadmill” describes the human tendency to revert to a baseline level of happiness following extreme events in our lives. While understandable as a coping mechanism, this psychological trait calls into question our ability to calibrate our actions proportionately to elevating threat levels in our precarious age. Works in the exhibition set human agency against this gravitational pull towards complacency. This struggle is meted out within the systems of online culture that are optimized to exploit this rage/refresh algorithm.

At the center of the exhibition is Baal’s Garden, an installation of painted canvas, papier-mache, and lcd monitors that contains an interactive digital work. This installation is named for the temple grounds in Baalbek, Lebanon, a site that has been attacked and rebuilt over thousands of years by numerous invaders.

Installation in “Overflow”

Brian Zegeer

Gallery 198 is pleased to present Overflow, a Skowhegan alumni group show guest curated by Andrew LaFarge Hamill, opening in July. Overflow is a site-responsive exhibition that brings together 21 multigenerational and multidisciplinary artists inquiring into how we relate to the waterways that support contemporary city life. All participating artists are alumni or former faculty of Skowhegan, one of the nation’s most renowned art schools, located in rural Maine. Grounded in Skowhegan’s ethos of sustainability and shared inquiry, the exhibition asserts the artist’s role as an active agent in stewarding waterways.
https://www.gallery198.com/s/Overflow_Press-Release-for-gallery-2.pdf

Brian Zegeer
a pool a pond a tide a cistern a spring , 2026
Mixed-media Installation, acrylic and latex-painted, hand-stitched fabric, cg animations on found monitors, recording of ghost stream walk with Eymund Diegel

20 by 10  by 5 feet

Ghost streams flow beneath the urban infrastructure, surfacing buried histories in flood and sinkhole. This installation visualizes geological shifts, erosions, eruptions from beneath the surface as movements counter to the conventional progression of time, a terraced fountain of brackish backflow by which precolonial history floods into the future. 

Lucky High Kick Array

Brian Zegeer

hand-made frame with augmented-reality-activated animation  
epoxy clay, dice, plywood, found objects, galvanized wire, acrylic paint, cg animation, soundtrack with vocals by Kiki

13 by 10.5 inches 2024

Baal’s Garden

Brian Zegeer

Baal’s Garden (work-in-progress)
cut paper animation, custom score with digital processing
3 mins 51 seconds
2024

Baal’s Garden (work-in-progress) is a cut paper animation following a family’s visit to a greenhouse, and subsequent infection by a hybrid creature. The narrative is meant to challenge conventional species taxonomies, the separation between human, animal, botanical life forms that drive our extractive relationship with the natural world. In the video, an individual’s identity is imagined as the consolidation of various microbiological ecologies into an aggregate ‘I’, crowd psychology sharpened to a razor point in the family group mind.

This work continues my practice of incorporating sculptural works in my animations, and deputizes some of these sculptures to act as homemade instruments, comprising much of the score.

Demure Marquis

Brian Zegeer

  • Demure Marquee(Flag) 2023 pigment print on silk Aluminum conduit Pigment print on wood Dimensions 72 by 24 by 21 inches
  • Demure Marquee(Flag) 2023 pigment print on silk Aluminum conduit Pigment print on wood Dimensions 72 by 24 by 21 inches