831 N. Highland Ave Los Angeles, CA 90038
Saturday, February 24 at 5:00 PM – 7:00 PM
Ends Mar 30, 2024
Diane Rosenstein is pleased to present Nothing To Say, a solo exhibition of new photographs by Egyptian American artist Amir Zaki (USA, b. 1974). For the past twenty-five years, Zaki has developed a photographic language which seeks to elevate the formal qualities of California’s architecture and landscape. For his second solo exhibition with Diane Rosenstein Gallery, he will present nineteen color photographs with two distinct subjects – roadside signs and winter trees in Central and Southern California.
“In a staring contest, a photograph always wins.”
Zaki is drawn to a direct, non-verbal experience of visual art. In Nothing To Say, the artist alters his photographs by digitally redacting text and graphics from these outdoor signs, thus revealing their inherent volume, shape and color. Photographed against a vibrant sky, and titled as archetypes, like ‘The Guru,’ ‘The Collector,’ or ‘The Monk,’ the signs take on a heroic quality and a nuanced personality.
The exhibition will also feature a suite of eight photographs of winter trees, offered as symbolic portraits of Zaki’s extended family. They serve, like many of Zaki’s exhibitions as a visual and conceptual counterweight to the adjacent sign series. Zaki has photographed trees for over a decade, and with each body of work, explores something unique. In Nothing To Say, Zaki challenges concepts around scale and place. The trees are depicted with trunk, branch, and leaf, but never shown rooted in the ground or in relation to other trees or elements of the landscape. Similarly, the signs are severed from place, and we see neither the pavement below nor the buildings that surround them.
Installed as a dialogue, these works demonstrate Zaki’s career-long curiosity about the way that photography can narrow the divide between the natural and the built landscape through its inevitable flattening out of space, as well as render relative scale ambiguous. The true scale is contained within the print itself.
A limited edition catalogue, Nothing To Say, was published by Diane Rosenstein Gallery on the occasion of this exhibition.
-
Amir Zaki (USA, b. 1974) makes photographs of California landscapes and architecture, and he re-envisions the world before him, creating a tension between the functional and the dysfunctional. “My own work has focused mainly on both the built and natural landscape of California. I am among a generation of photographers who truly embraced digital technology as a way to make photographs that could not be made using only traditional means.”