Bryan Zanisnik was born in Union, New Jersey and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received an MFA from Hunter College and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has recently exhibited and performed in New York at MoMA PS1, Sculpture Center, and the Queens Museum of Art; in Philadelphia at the Fabric Workshop and Museum; in Miami at the De La Cruz Collection; in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Photography; in Los Angeles at LAXART; and internationally at the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, the Kunsthalle Exnergasse in Vienna and the Futura Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. Zanisnik’s work has been reviewed in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, ARTnews, Modern Painters, and Time Out New York, amongst others. He has completed residencies at the Macdowell Colony, the Art Omi International Artists Residency, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, and the Guangdong Times Museum in Guangzhou, China.

Working in performance, installation, and photography, and often incorporating my parents, my multidisciplinary practice addresses issues of memory, masculinity, familial relationships, Freudian psychology, and Americana culture. Recent live performances include standing inside a plexi-glass box for five weeks and endlessly reading a Philip Roth novel as baseball cards and U.S. currency are fanned around my body. Another performance presented at the former hunting residency of Kaiser Wilhelm II entailed holding a rifle and an oversized submarine sandwich for two hours within a site-specific installation of dated communist memorabilia and furniture. My photographs also explore these issues of time and masculinity by creating narratives that unfold around enigmatic sets built within the studio. The narrative of each constructed photograph constantly shifts, appearing as a child’s bedroom, the cluttered basement of an obsessive individual, and as a small-town, Americana museum.