Hedonistic Treadmill
July 10 - August 2, 2026
Brian Zegeer
Opening reception: July 10, 6–8pm
Press Release
Underdonk is pleased to present Hedonistic Treadmill, a solo exhibition of mixed-media sculptures and moving image works by Brian Zegeer. Please join us for the opening reception on July 10th, 2026 from 6-8pm. The exhibition will be on view from July 10th-August 2nd, 2026.
The term “Hedonistic Treadmill” describes the human tendency to revert to a baseline level of happiness following extreme events in our lives. While understandable as a coping mechanism, this psychological trait calls into question our ability to calibrate our actions proportionately to elevating threat levels in our precarious age. Works in the exhibition set human agency against this gravitational pull towards complacency. This struggle is meted out within the systems of online culture that are optimized to exploit this rage/refresh algorithm.
At the center of the exhibition is Baal's Garden, an installation of painted canvas, papier-mache, and LCD monitors that contains an interactive digital work. This installation is named for the temple grounds in Baalbek, Lebanon, a site that has been attacked and rebuilt over thousands of years by numerous invaders.
The soft sculptures arranged across the floor are meant to evoke the scattered statuary of the modern day temple grounds. In the gallery installation, these sculptures are shaped after historical borders of the Lebanon and the Greater Syria region.
Visitors can sit within the installation and interface with its ‘digital twin’ on the embedded monitors, a game in which the user rearranges versions of the soft sculptures. In recombining these territories, redrawing the map, the user adopts the mechanics of nation-building. There is no victory or end state, only the perpetual, haptic feedback loop of US foreign intervention.
Other works in the exhibition play with the endless cycling between emotional peak and valley, as with the titular Hedonistic Treadmill, a wall-mounted sculpture evoking a group of internal organs, a circulatory system with no input or output.
SpoLiGo-type Array consists of two stacked monitors fronted by a wooden screen. The work adopts the glossy aesthetic of medical visualizations, representations of gene editing, of viral ecologies propagated in colorful cg by pharmaceutical companies. This abstract idiom dramatizes the eradication of disease and suggests the elevation of our species beyond the constraints of its genome. But its vernacular is tinged with the utopianism of 20th century formalism, and this raises questions about the veracity of the worldview it espouses–what it means to be healed, and whole.
Brian Zegeer is an interdisciplinary artist living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. His animations and sculptural installations explore the Applachian and Lebanese landscapes of his heritage as repositories of embedded stories, collective hallucinations. Zegeer worked with archives and community activists to reclaim the story of "Little Syria", Manhattan's first Arabic neighborhood. In a 2014-16 residency at the Queens Museum, he explored this history against the backdrop of Robert Moses’ profound and problematic impact on NYC. He is currently studying the ghost streams running beneath Sunset Park, which occasionally break through as floods or sinkholes, pre-modern history reasserting itself through the contemporary urban infrastructure. Zegeer received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has exhibited in galleries and museums in the NYC region and abroad.