Anxiety Engine and Inhibitor
Brian Zegeer
acrylic on canvas, yarn, and steel mesh around found monitors, cg animations, pigment print on bond paper backdrop, black sand
10 by 8 by 2 feet
2024
Author: Brian Zegeer
Animated shorts 2022-2023
My cg shorts from 2020 – 2023 depict human bodies at extremely close proximity. During the pandemic we were dealing with the dual pressures of distancing ourselves from society while at the same time being bottled up with those in our households for months at a time.
These animated shorts explore the terror of closeness in a global pandemic (or the exhaustion with intimacy among family members interminably breathing the same stale air) using the physics engine of the cg software to calculate trajectory of approach, the destructive consequences of touch. Bodies rupture in moments of contact, but sometimes reemerge as a something new, hybrid.
Under sufficient magnification, the body dissolves, pores open to reveal inner landscapes, gut biome, unraveled genetic threads. The body is an ecosystem and potential enemy, subject to violent virus-born storms of immuno-suppression and systemic collapse. Medical visualizations were the landscape of the pandemic era, the theater in which sublime forces played out.
Asad Kahlil’s Sword
Baal’s Garden
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.
The Bewilderness is no resting place!
And they expanded warrantless wiretapping the bastards!
The Fog of Why
Carceri
The Flowering of Disarray and other Stories
Colored pencil and ink on paper
10 by 7
2024
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