Bryan Zanisnik Keeps It in the Family

How does an artist figure out what’s truly essential? Performing A Woman Waits For Me II (2014) with his parents at Pace University in Lower Manhattan, artist Bryan Zanisnik discusses how he draws on his family and personal history in his artwork. In this film, Zanisnik returns to his parents’ home in Springfield, New Jersey to dig up the long-forgotten home movies he made as an adolescent. Inspired by Hollywood film directors like Martin Scorsese, the VHS movies are an unironic mix of slapstick comedy and gangster violence, with Zanisnik’s grandmother often playing an armed and dangerous protagonist. Uncovering the videos in graduate school was a eureka moment for Zanisnik.

“I thought, ‘This is who I really am.’ These interests in the abject, the absurd, the humor, the gender inversions, the fragility,” he explains, “the conversations between the performer and me behind the camera was really getting to the core of what I wanted out of an artwork.” Frequently incorporating his parents in his work, Zanisnik creates performances in which power dynamics—such as struggles for control between parent and child—play out in surreal scenarios.

As part of the exhibition Oblique Strategies at Pace University’s Peter Fingesten Gallery, Zanisnik performs inside a wooden museum display case transformed into a mobile sculpture, as his parents and the audience look on. Tightly confined inside the sculpture and straining to move through the building’s hallways, Zanisnik intentionally knocks into onlookers, challenging them to respond. For Zanisnik, the performance A Woman Waits For Me II (2014) evokes his own emotional journey from a reclusive adolescent to the artist he is today.

Also featuring the artworks Meadowlands Picaresque (2013); Dissociative Pastry and Stone (2011); Repetition Compulsion (2010); Ten-Thousand Meals Than Ever Yet (2009); When I Was a Child I Caught a Fleeting Glimpse (2009); He Is Not a Man (2007); Next of Kin (2007); Family Reunion (2006); and Remembrance of Things Past (2006).

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