ZYNKA Gallery

This series of mixed-media collages is rooted in observation — in the art of people watching and the fleeting theater of public life. The works explore the tension between visibility and anonymity, individuality and performance, memory and myth-making. The 1990s now feel like the threshold between two worlds: the final moment before technology fundamentally altered our relationship to privacy, identity, and self-expression. Before the omnipresence of cell phones, cameras, and social media, there existed a rare freedom — the ability to move through the world unrecorded, to invent oneself continuously and without scrutiny.

Blending autobiography with pop culture, nightlife, politics, and collective memory, these works preserve fragments of a disappearing New York City. They are layered portraits of a city, a generation, and a state of mind that can never fully exist again.

“In the Air Tonight takes its title from the iconic 1981 song by Phil Collins, whose music helped shape the emotional landscape of my youth. This exhibition functions as both a personal diary and cultural meditation — a reflection on growing up in New York City during the transformative decades of the1990s. My years at the School of Visual Arts gave me the confidence and freedom to experience New York City expansively and without limitation. At that time, the city felt cinematic — like one continuous MTV music video unfolding in real time. Manhattan became my playground, a place of constant discovery, spectacle, performance, and reinvention.

I spent countless nights immersed in the city’s legendary nightlife scene: dancing until dawn at The Roxy while DJs Junior Vasquez, Victor Calderone, or Frankie Knuckles commanded the room; walking the balconies of The Limelight — a former Episcopalian church — while club kids performed inside cages suspended above the dance floor; descending the famous slide at Club USA; or standing outside the Palladium watching an extraordinary procession of cultural icons and downtown personalities pass by — Madonna, Chris Rock, Rosie Perez, and Mickey Rourke— alongside countless unforgettable New Yorkers. It was a singular era defined by experimentation, glamour, spontaneity, and personal freedom. " — Gavin Benjamin