robZtv: The Recent Past Is A Distant Time (video residency at Mini Mart City Park, Seattle)

Happy to have my work projected streetside from dusk to dawn at Mini Mart City Park, a non-profit art gallery in the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle.

robZtv Mini Mart City Park Video Residency
January 15 - 18, 2026
6525 Ellis Avenue South
Seattle, WA 98108
https://www.minimartcitypark.com

Synopsis:

robZtv is the ongoing street videography project of Robert Zverina, who since 2003 has shot tens of thousands of candid micromovies using the same cheap digital pocket camera (the legendary Canon PowerShot S200 Digital Elph). Custom curated for Mini Mart City Park, this selection focuses on Seattle in the early 2000s, from cherished landmarks to vanished hangouts. Mixing public events and private moments, this chronologically organized compilation presents a time capsule of that familiar but distant world before smart phones, social media, and "artificial intelligence" rearranged our culture.


Artist Statement:

"The struggle against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." -Milan Kundera

I'm not saying hold on to every grudge and trauma, but don't be too quick to normalize changes that might not be in our collective best interest. For those old enough to have lived it, I hope my work serves as a bridge to their own memories. For those too young to remember, I offer this idiosyncratic pastiche as a glimpse of a simpler time.


Bio:

Robert Zverina was born in Liberty, NY to recently emigrated Czech political refugees. He grew up in various Long Island suburbs, straddling two cultures in a household that mixed immigrant aspiration with Old World defeatism, the latter compounded by a series of calamities which dogged the family and kept it bouncing from one precarious circumstance to another. Like many coping with dislocation and alienation, he turned to art at an early age in an unconscious attempt to craft his own narrative.

After studying literature and creative writing at Cornell, he received an MFA in Poetry from Brooklyn College under the mentorship of Allen Ginsberg. Initially skeptical about computers and the internet, in 1997 he launched his ongoing Picture of the Day website (http://www.zverina.com), paving the way for future bloggers with an autobiographical mix of creative nonfiction, photography, and multimedia elements.

Embracing the DIY spirit of the punk rock ethos that saved his life as a dispirited youth, he has self-published a novel (BUZZ), produced a series of cinema verité DVDs (robZtv), single-handedly made a feature film (One’s A Crowd), and is a founding member of absurdist jam band 4Shadows.

Zverina lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife Sarah Kavage and two glorious cats, Sunny and Patchouli. He supports his mostly non-commercial art practice by working as a self-employed carpenter.