Aptly titled “Our Daily Dread”, the multimedia exhibition references a contemporary domestic space as a dreadful stage amid today’s avalanche of alarming news. The mundane routines of doing daily activities—laundry, cooking, personal maintenance—face off against the presence of the recent pandemic, military conflicts, and climate change.
The exhibition engages the audience with a collaborative conversation amongst five artist friends, offering their daily existential common dreads, questioning the ongoing socio-political rhetoric in juxtaposition with their raw anxiety and outrage in the face of intractable societal ills. In paintings, drawings, sculpture, and video, these artists visualize their struggles within a sunny converted brownstone space of The Bridge & Tunnel Gallery in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights.
More About the Collective:
Using landscape and bureaucracy as material, Jessica Segall explores belonging through inter-species, site-specific work. Her work plays with both the risk of engaging with the environment and the vulnerability of the environment itself. Recent exhibitions include Coreana Museum of Art, The Fries Museum, The National Museum of American Jewish History and screenings at COP 26 and TED. Jessica received grants from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and Art Matters, and attended artist residencies at Skowhegan, MacDowell and Van Eyck Academie. Her work has been in Cabinet Magazine, The New York Times and Sculpture Magazine. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2010 and lives in Brooklyn. Currently, her work is screening at The Kim Dong Ho Art Museum and at Millwork in collaboration with The Joslyn Art Museum.
Brian Zegeer was born in Lexington, KY. His work encounters the Appalachian and Lebanese landscapes of his ancestry as highly-charged networks of belonging and collective hallucination. He makes animations and sculptural installations to visualize the psychological resonance spun into spaces by the people who inhabit them. In the past he has worked with community groups to recover the history of Little Syria, NYC’s first Arabic neighborhood. Zegeer received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He was an artist-in-residence at the Queens Museum from 2014 to 2016. He has exhibited in galleries and museums in the NYC region and abroad.
Katayoun Vaziri is an artist living between Mexico and New York City. Since her MFA from Yale School of art in 2009 she has had solo & group shows in New York, London, Dubai and Mexico. In her work, Katayoun depicts ordinary citizens who are simultaneously subjects and objects of capitalism: we are political agents of social transformation, yet inevitably subjected to socio-economic inequalities that demand us to forgo our ideals for the sake of survival. In this duality and paradox of our daily life, do we need empathy or critique? In Katayoun’s work, the aesthetic lies exactly in this paradox. Staying away from politics of representation, she hopes the audience will observe the subject/body through effects of leisure and labor.
Eric Ramos Guerrero is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City whose work investigates notions of The West through landscapes of suburban California, the US/Mexican border and the tropical spaces of migratory expansion. Eric exhibits work internationally, including The Drawing Center NY, El Museo De Barrio NY, The Knockdown Center NY, Beaux Arts FR, Museum of Contemporary Art Vojvodina, White Box NY, ICPNY, Inside-Out Museum Beijing, Mathilde Hatzenberger Gallery Belgium, and Green Papaya Philippines. Eric has been a resident artist at The Drawing Center, Marble House Project Residency, and Triangle Arts Organization.
Ashkan Behzadi, a 2021-2022 Guggenheim Fellow in Composition, is an Iranian-Canadian composer residing in Brooklyn. He earned his DMA in composition at Columbia University, and prior to this, he graduated from McGill University where he finished his bachelor’s degree in composition and music theory. Ashkan also has a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Tehran University. Ashkan has been commissioned and performed by various international festivals and ensembles, including TAK Ensemble, Oerknal Ensemble, JACK Quartet, Divertimento Ensemble, Ensemble Alternance, and featured at such festivals and concert series as Dialoge Festival at Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg, Rondo 2017 in Milan, and Manifeste 2014 at IRCAM.
The Bridge & Tunnel Gallery stands at the intersection of ideation, creation, and community building. Thinkers, makers, and artists from historically underrepresented communities use the shared space to create and offer their work. Through the gallery’s meticulous curation and production, this art space has become a playground for the senses—a place where creators, vendors, and patrons culturally gather and connect to build a better world.
The Curatorial Agency, led by Sanam Samanian, works globally to introduce contemporary cultural projects. The Agency collaborates with others in the creative sector (architects, artists, media, photographers, documentarians, filmmakers, developers, producers, designers, institutions, cultural organizations, galleries, art spaces, think tanks) and most importantly, the public, for the exhibition of thoughtful, narrative-based curatorial content
Sanam Samanian, is an international writer/curator who reflects the future of human ecology. Curious and analytical, she investigates the most forward-looking, revered contemporary human interventions—art/architecture/design—within their broader cultural context, finding their conceptual connections, value, and influence in our evolutionary process. Over the years, her multilayered content has been curated globally in various formats—exhibitions, installations, festivals, essays, editorials, interviews, documentaries, proposals, presentations, project stories, archival content, white papers, and panel discussions. This body of work has been the result of working with innovative architects, artists, designers, and interdisciplinary institutions such as the Aga Khan Museum, Hot Docs Festival, New York’s Governors Island Art Fair, MacLaren Art Centre, Art Gallery of Ontario, Harbourfront Centre, and Canada’s Design Museum (Design Exchange) as well as contributions to renowned journals like Azure, Canadian Architect, ArchDaily, and Spacing. As the founder of the Curatorial Agency, she is currently curating independent projects in contemporary art and supporting the development of cutting-edge architecture/design firms with a curated approach.
