Artist Talk: Gary Sczerbaniewicz: Neil Before Zod

Gary Sczerbaniewicz: Neil Before Zod
​Opens at Cohen Gallery September 14
Opening reception Friday, September 14, 6-9pm

​Cohen Gallery will host a month-long exhibition of work by alumnus Gary Sczerbaniewicz '95. Neil Before Zod" opens Sept. 14 and runs through Oct. 19. Sczerbaniewicz earned a B.F.A. in sculpture from Alfred University in 1995 and went on to earn an M.F.A. in visual studies from the University at Buffalo in 2013.
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Sczerbaniewicz's series of installation works investigates the interplay between the rational and the irrational as illustrated in three interactive spatial vignettes. The conceptual matrix behind NBZ arises from the true-life relationship between chemist, rocket scientist, and founding member of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jack Whiteside Parsons, and the pulp-science fiction writer and founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard. The two belonged to a US offshoot of a European sex-magick cult called Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO), through which they attempted to produce a "Moon Child"... a synthesis of human and demonic entities.

This uncanny co-mingling of rational, post-enlightenment science with mystical, occult, and arcane magical practices creates a compelling impetus for artistic play and wild rumination. Sczerbaniewicz has subsumed this bizarre narrative and its extended "family" into a composition furthering his interest in creating disorienting viewing scenarios in which spectator and subject are brought together under specific physical and spatial constraints, and to create viewing environments that embrace a sense of cognitive dissonance and intellectual uncertainty.
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