Detail | Amir Zaki

Meditations on the Hollywood Juniper was exhibited in Truthiness: Photography as Sculpture at California Museum of Photography in 2008. This video brings together simultaneous depictions of two views of the common street tree and transforms them into an ambiguous and otherworldly form. 

Amir Zaki is a Californian-based artist whose work explores the urban landscape through photography, video and sound. Usually known for his architectural photographic digital intervention works, Wallflower has chosen to juxtapose his video works with __on this site, a photographic curatorial initiative that challenges eight photographers to photograph the same location. For the first project the photographs are being produced in Melbourne along Kororoit Creek (known as “shit creek”) that runs through the western suburbs.

Zaki’s work deals with the act of looking, the real and imagined in depictions of the urban Californian landscape and architecture. During an interview in revolver, he spoke of exploring the embedded fiction in the landscape which is built from a shared mythology and how this semi-fictive representation of an area can grow to supersede the reality of the landscape. Building on this, he is using the vocabulary of the documentary style to capitalise on the presumed truth of a photograph. His combination of the elements of documentary reality and artificiality creates a style which he describes as "Hybrid Photography".


His second video work at Wallflower, Hand Held Moon Cycle was also exhibited in Art Basel’s Miami Beach "Art Video" in 2010, curated by Lauri Firstenberg, LAXART, Los Angeles, that was a focused look at the artists who are contributing to a conversation about the dynamics of a particular locale.

http://amirzaki.com/