Heeb

Text by Ernest Loesser

As evidenced by his recent exhibit Dry Bones Can Harm No Man, on view through November 15 at Sunday L.E.S, Bryan Zanisnik works assiduously across photography, video, sculpture and performance art. Very casually, he invites you inside his delicately manicured domestic quarters where hackneyed treasures and personal relics ferment with small doses of Dada humor. By capturing these still-life sculptures as formal portraits, Zanisnik hopes to preserve his peculiar American homesteads in the collective consciousness. And completing the open house visit, the artist presents his very own father in a video installation as the archetypal tour guide through the fictions and memories of a nuclear family.         

How did you begin working with your immediate family?

When I was 13-years-old, I shot eight hours of war movies with my grandmother. I had her act out scenes from World War II, and then other movies where she acted as a recent immigrant to America. Then years later when I was in graduate school, I went back to my parents’ house and found these videos in their basement that were never finished. I edited the eight hours into five-minute videos, so about 25 minutes of finished work. They became a document of that time in my life and my relationship with my grandmother. At the time I wasn’t conscious of art and it wasn’t made for a public audience; it was made for a screening in my living room.

So, you were working with family even when you were exploring just a nascent compulsion for filmmaking…

Exactly. They were very violent, very aggressive and about issues that are still so relevant today. Having finished that project, I was very happy with it, but wanted to see where I could take the work from there. I continued this on-going collaboration with my immediate family, mother and father that expanded into live performance.  

"Dad and the 12 Signs", 20 × 27", 2008, C-Print

Is Dry Bones Can Harm No Man, a summation of your previous work or a departure?

I didn’t want it to be so literally about my parents, instead, that the ideas are being filtered through them. The photographs are all of sets I built in my studio and they shift between appearing as domestic homes and museum displays. They suggest domesticity but also fiction, becoming portraits of spaces that are private and public.That relates to the videos of my father acting as a museum tour guide trying to correlate items that are institutional and personal.  

"On the Seventh Sea," 30 × 40", 2008, C-Print

Was it difficult to convince your parents to participate?

They have no background in art; my mom is a schoolteacher and my dad is a businessman. It has always taken baby steps. If I can get them to do something, then next time it can be even more involved. I’ve been doing performances with them for about a year and a half, and step-by-step, they’re willing to be engaged a little more.  

 "The Bough That Falls with All its Trophies Hung," 35 × 83", C-Print, 2009

How do you construct the sets for your photographs? 

I started looking at snapshots from my grandmother’s home. At some point my own parents became minimalists and I’m trying to reclaim some of this mental memory. It’s not nostalgic because I’m not romanticizing it. Rather, it’s about aging, decay and memory. It begins by collecting objects that might work as a narrative or even a fractured narrative. It’s like building a sculpture that’s framed with a camera. If you look at the photograph "To Hell and Back," there are all these things suggesting Americana-an Alabama license plate, Wild-West paperback books, Polaroid snapshots-but then there is absurdity too. If you keep piecing it together it falls apart. The video of my father trying to name and place everything in his own home speaks about time and preservation. It asks: where have we been and what are we collecting?  

"To Hell and Back (Nothing)", 40 × 30", 2008, C-Print

What happens to the set materials once you’ve completed the photograph?

The objects are acquired, the set is built, the photo is captured, and then the materials are usually discarded. Occasionally, an object might reappear in another work, but for the most part I consider it ephemera. To save the material would fetishise it.

To view more images and learn more about Bryan Zanisnik’s exhibition Dry Bones Can Harm No Man visit Hortonliu.com.