BRIAN ZEGEER
Brian Zegeer
Brian Zegeer was born in Lexington, KY. His works encounter the Appalachian and Lebanese landscapes of his parentage as highly-charged networks of belonging and collective hallucination. Zegeer believes that the process of stop-motion animation can awaken the quiet narratives embedded in a place.
Zegeer worked with archivists and community groups to recover the story of the Manhattan’s Little Syria and the early 20th Century literary movement that blossomed there. He recently completed a 2-year residency at the Queens Museum, examining this history against the backdrop of Robert Moses’ transformative vision for the city, and his role in the Little Syria community’s displacement.
Zegeer is interested in the way our beliefs, prejudices, and neuroses shape our perceptions of the spaces we inhabit, particularly at the intersection of the Southern-American and Lebanese-American cultures that constitute his upbringing. He has made videos mining ghosts in Manhattan’s former Little Syria, used stop-motion animation as an analogue for spirit invocation in Allen Ginsberg’s former apartment. Zegeer’s recent works are sculptural assemblages composed of pigment prints. These objects are composited scenes of the artist’s living space and snapshots from day-to-day life. Holes are cut in the prints and unrelated environments are woven into one anther, meaning to suggest the pressures that peripheral events in our lives exert over us at each moment. In a sense, he means to evoke how our perceptions are transformed by the blitz of psychological static kissing up against the quotidian moments of our lives.