3 December – 23 January

Opening reception: Friday, 3 December, from 6:00pm – 11:00pm

Marginal Utility is proud to present “Open Brain Case and Forceps”, a solo exhibition of a new video and installation by the Brooklyn based artists Brian Zanisnik.

Zanisnik often shoots in the artist's hometown and surrounding areas. This provides a biographical center to the work that Zanisnik elevates from private to shared daydreams of symptoms and emotional maladies that are set within scenes of suburban New Jersey and populated with artist's family and friends. Zanisnik highlights the benefits of making the useful useless, through a counterpoint-like soup of jump cuts between a retired collector's mania for mouse traps, and footage of the artist frantically riding a child's rocking horse bare-chested and wearing a mouse tail made out of duct tape.

By showing how an retiree collector from New Jersey interprets the museum's collection to a younger visitor with shades of historicism and humor, Zanisnik provides glimpses into our shared past that's shed off nostalgia's weight. The collector's descriptions are considered in relation to our present 24-7 mentality of ever expanding bandwidths and smart phones, where every waking and sleeping second can, and should, be put to practical use. The video equates the physicality and barebones utility of the museum's mousetraps with the frenetic movements of the artist's own body, creating a visceral setting that is abjectly childlike and ridiculously self-deprecating.

Zanisnik will also perform on January 7th. This two-hour long performance within the installation will include the artist's parents utilizing objects in the installation as well as additional food items.

This exhibition was made possible in part by a grant from The Foundation For Contemporary Arts.