Lucas Samaras

Bryan Zanisnik’s “Green Owls Manhattan Bridge” is all illusion. In reality, this apparent flat collage is actually an elaborately constructed set, complete with foregrounds and backgrounds, stools, digitally printed wall paper and even windows to the outside world. Through July 1st, Zanisnik’s studio was located on the 8th floor of 20 Jay Street in DUMBO, (only a few floors above our office) with a view of the Brooklyn Bridge. The artist waited until sunset to shoot his still lives, which created that perfect blueprint blue you see in the shots of the bridge above. The set itself was photographed under studio lights.
This approach reminds me a little of Artie Vierkant’s digital manipulations of his exhibition documentation—in both cases, the artist’s statement seems to be that the documentation is the work. But it also seems a break from artists in the early aughts whose work relied mostly on various photoshop filters. Lucas Samaras’s self portraits and Cory Arcangel’s Photoshop gradient instruction paintings might be the highest profile example of such work, but there are plenty more examples. Is this new interest in physical illusion a shift away from digital manipulation?