“Hedonistic Treadmill” at Underdonk

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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. 

A Fly in the Array

Brian Zegeer

Commands: WASD – SPACE to throw battle axe (fullscreen for better play)

A game I made this Summer while curating A Fly in the Array exhibition for the Wrong Biennial, made from assets borrowed from the virtual exhibition website. Also a domestic tableaux, photos of our rug, the building lobby floor tiles, an orchid given as a gift to my daughter from a former student. Teaching myself Unity to teach to students and teaching myself creative cannibalism, folding a curatorial project into a class, dodging between the guardians that divide the discourses as institutions crumble to epochal cultural shifts, coming up for air in 2026 confused, refreshed, angry and resolute. (WASD Space) 

A Fly in the Array

Brian Zegeer

I’m thrilled to announce my new curatorial project, A Fly in the Array, organized as part of the Wrong Biennale 2025. 

The exhibition includes 12 artists who embrace idiosyncratic systems for organizing knowledge. Their respective methods of engineering controlled accidents, assembling vernacular archives, or softening the rigid lines of the urban infrastructure can be seen as acts of resistance against the frictionless control surfaces of agentic authoritarianism that increasingly define our age.

The online exhibition portal arises from this ethos, a quirky non-SEO-optimized ecology, embracing the errata of its native HTML, CSS, JavaScript seedbed. Please visit and bask in its slow/load time. In-person exhibition to follow in 2026.

https://www.aflyinthearray.com

Participating Artists:

Nobutaka Aozaki #nobutakaaozaki
Tova Carlin @bigtov
Hallie Cohen @halliecohenart
Ilknur Demirkoparan @ilknur.demirkoparan
Rachel Frank @rachelfrankfrank
Lineadeluz @lineadeluz
Mary Mattingly @marymattingly
Caleb Nussear @calebkayin
John O’Connor, with Rick Moody @jjayosea
Alex Paik @alexpaik
Andrew Prayzner @prayznerstudio
Antonio Serna @antonioserna.nyc

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