Bryan Zanisnik

His site-specific installations have addressed diverse subjects, including a crumbling library of Philip Roth novels, an entropic swamp littered with Northern New Jersey waste, and an Americana museum reconstructed in Guangzhou, China.

Critic David Duncan commented that Zanisnik "comical impartation of dubious history and catalogue of trivial possessions sidestep sentimentality while conveying a fascination with the type of inherited narrative that gets passed down in close-knit families.

According to Artnet magazine, "the law firm representing author Philip Roth personally served performance artist Bryan Zanisnik with a cease and desist letter at the Abrons Arts Center on New York's Lower East Side, where Zanisnik was in the midst of staging Every Inch a Man, a performance that involves locking himself inside a Plexiglass case while he silently reads Roth's The Great American Novel and a fan blows old baseball cards and money into the air around him.

Critic Christine Smallwood said Zanisnik's "photo essay in Triple Canopy 'Beyond Passaic' documents the author's illegal wanderings in New Jersey's heavily polluted and largely neglected Meadowlands.

While Smithson was drawn to 'geology and rock quarries, monumental vacancies and ruins in reverse', Zanisnik is interested in the legal ambiguity of the space, its toxicity, and the people living on its waste.

Museum of Americans in China, Site-Specific Installation and Performance, 2011
When I Was a Child I Caught a Fleeting Glimpse, Performance, 2009
To Hell and Back (Nothing), 40" x 30", C-Print, 2008