Category: video

“Hedonistic Treadmill” at Underdonk

Brian ZegeerLeave a comment

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”

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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

Animated shorts 2022-2023

Brian Zegeer

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.

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.