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.

SpoLiGo-Type Array

Brian Zegeer

SpoLiGo-Type Array
acrylic on plywood, galvanized-steel wire,epoxy resin, and found objects in a free-standing screen, mixed-media animation on dual monitors
60 by 45 by 15 inches, 5 minute looping animation 

SpoLiGo-Type Array (2023) combines a two-channel video and a sculptural screen into the representation of a human body through the abstract idiom of medical visualizations. Named after one of techniques involved in gene editing, this work is also meant to illicit the human microbiome, imagining human identity as a non-monolithic ecosystem in which various interests collaborate and compete.

Demure Marquis

Brian Zegeer

  • Demure Marquee(Flag) 2023 pigment print on silk Aluminum conduit Pigment print on wood Dimensions 72 by 24 by 21 inches
  • Demure Marquee(Flag) 2023 pigment print on silk Aluminum conduit Pigment print on wood Dimensions 72 by 24 by 21 inches

Spring / Break 2022

Brian Zegeer

Stochastic Garden
2022
evolving mixed-media installation, Spring / Break 2022 variation
pigment prints on plywood, cg animation, Little Syria Parade props, found objects
dimensions variable

“Real Realism” curated by TUSSLE Projects

“WE PROCLAIM… Real Realism acknowledges yesterday and tomorrow is simultaneous.  We obliterate this time element by a retrograde motion that would penetrate consciousness, reassuring us that a renaissance might still be thinkable.”

Amy Bassin
Jack Henry
Laura Horne
Julia Kissina
Brian Zegeer


TUSSLE projects Booth 1126
SPRING BREAK ART SHOW September 7 – 12, 2022