Bryan Zanisnik

Marking our 5th year in Culver City, Zanisnik's exhibition Skull Crusher 1964 consists of a new multidisciplinary body of work that loosely explores a road trip across America in 1964. The exhibition will include large-scale photographs, a multi-channel video and a site-specific installation. The two new large-scale photographs are of sets constructed outdoors by the artist in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, NY, where the artist’s studio is currently located. The park is most famous for being the site of the 1964 World’s Fair, and there are still remains of the fair’s monuments scattered throughout the park. Zanisnik’s photographs open up onto these monuments through tattered and torn holes in his sets. The camera peers through domestic and found materials such as torn wallpapers, metal wall studs, and printouts of antique furniture to reveal observation decks, carved, gold medallions and a giant metallic globe in the distance. The photographs conflate foreground and background into a flattened and disoriented space that feels both artificial and documentary at the same time. The photographs speak to current trends in digital manipulation and collage, yet are inherently unmanipulated and authentic photographs of the park.

In the two-channel video, 13 States, Zanisnik loosely documents a recent drive from the Northeast to the Southern United States. While one channels details a journey through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park and abandoned roadside attractions the other channel reveals domestic objects floating over a hypnotic computer-generated highway. Zanisnik uses the road trip genre as a starting point for this work but ultimately the narrative collapses upon itself. Incorporating found highway footage, clip art, animation, and television infomercials, Zanisnik’s video blurs sites, states, performance and document while archiving the objects and experiences collected along the way. Zanisnik has had a long fascination with roadside America, an interest that began with his first job, working at a highway carnival in New Jersey in the late 1990s.