Show #64
Roadside Picnic: Brian Zegeer + Naomi Nakazato
Curated by Rachel Frank
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 20th, 6-8 pm
Dates: February 20 - April 4 2020
Hours: Thurs-Sat, 12-6pm
“A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras ... Afire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about ... Scattered rags, burnt-out bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp ... and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone’s handkerchief, someone’s penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow ...”
-Roadside Picnic, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Roadside Picnic by Soviet-Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky was published in 1972. Stalker, the film by Andrei Tarkovsky, which was based loosely on the novel, came out in 1979.
In Roadside Picnic, an event: an unseen meteorite or alien visitation has created an off-limits area on Earth called the Zone. This area is littered with enigmatic artifacts left over from the event, which hold both great technological power and immense danger. The true purpose of these objects is unknown to the scientists who study them and to the Stalkers who risk their lives to collect them for money. The landscape within the Zone appears normal, but has been transformed by the event. Flowers hold no scent, common things like cobwebs and grass may not be what they seem, time moves at another pace, and there are hidden dangers if one does not properly read the landscape and move with care. People too are transformed by the Zone and sometimes never return. Because of these dangers, the Zone is abandoned and forbidden, but like anything that is prohibited and unknown, this intensifies the desires and the myths about the landscape.
Naomi Nakazato examines her divergent biracial Japanese-American identity and questions of authenticity and belonging through a mixture of printmaking, sculpture, and use of mass-produced industrial materials. Pulling from online stockphotos of landscapes –idealized but inaccessible versions of place–Nakazato combines topographical elements with fragments of language amid fields of technological grids. The landscape elements are printed on transparent Plexiglas allowing these topographies to be multiplied and imposed over the space of the gallery like a form of low-tech virtual reality. The addition of handmade marks serves to humanize these synthetic elements adding glitches to the technological field. By presenting the works either lower to the viewer or on slightly raised platforms, these fragments of place are further idealized and ritualized as places of desire.
Brian Zegeer’s work uses landscape elements, the body, and sculptural collage to explore the impacts of genetics, biology, and place on identity and familial relationships. Advances in medical science and companies like 23andMe allow us to have intimate knowledge about the various hidden diseases, susceptibilities, and risks to our health (while also sharing this lucrativedata) based on our DNA. At the same time we are learning how the trillions of microorganisms living within our bodies affect our health, mental well being, weight, and other factors. These hidden internal genetic markers and bacterial ecosystems coupled with the daily environmental factors we are exposed to are imposing influence on our bodies, manifesting themselves in various ways. The competition and influence of these entities on the self lead to questions of agency and responsibility. In Zegeer’s tangled collages, the distinction between the man-made, the body, and the natural landscape dissolve and become hybrid forms anxiously impressing upon one another.
