{"id":51537,"date":"2016-08-30T16:28:35","date_gmt":"2016-08-30T23:28:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/?page_id=51537"},"modified":"2026-02-02T13:31:03","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T21:31:03","slug":"amir-zaki","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/people\/faculty\/amir-zaki\/","title":{"rendered":"Amir Zaki"},"content":{"rendered":"

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241 Arts Building<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>

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Website<\/p><\/div><\/div><\/div>[\/vc_column][vc_column width=”3\/4″][vc_column_text]Amir Zaki<\/strong> is a practicing artist living in Southern California. He received his MFA from\u00a0UCLA<\/a>\u00a0in 1999 and has been regularly exhibiting nationally and internationally since. Zaki has had over 30 solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including the\u00a0Mak Center Schindler House<\/a>, the\u00a0Doyle Arts Pavilion, the\u00a0Dalian Modern Museum (China)<\/a>, ACME gallery, Perry Rubenstein Gallery,\u00a0James Harris Gallery<\/a>,\u00a0Edward Cella Art & Architecture<\/a>, and\u00a0Roberts Projects (formerly Roberts and Tilton)<\/a>. He has been included in over 50 group exhibitions in significant venues including\u00a0The California Biennial: 2006 at the Orange County museum of Art<\/a>, the\u00a0Whitney Museum of American Art<\/a>\u00a0in New York, Andreas Grimm Gallery in Munich, Germany, Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York,\u00a0Flag Art Foundation<\/a>\u00a0in New York,\u00a0Western Bridge\u00a0in Seattle,\u00a0Shane Campbell Gallery\u00a0<\/a>in Chicago, the\u00a0California Museum of Photography,\u00a0Museum of Photographic Arts<\/a>\u00a0in San Diego, the\u00a0San Jose Museum of Art<\/a>, and the\u00a0Nevada Museum of Art<\/a>. Zaki\u2019s work is part of numerous public and private collections across the country including the\u00a0Whitney Museum of American Art<\/a>,\u00a0New Museum of Contemporary Art<\/a>,\u00a0Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)<\/a>,\u00a0UCLA Hammer Museum<\/a>, the\u00a0Henry Art Gallery<\/a>\u00a0in Seattle, Washington, the\u00a0Orange County museum of Art<\/a>, and the\u00a0Santa Barbara Museum of Art<\/a>. Zaki has three monographs, VLHV (2003), Eleven Minus One (2010) and\u00a0California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks<\/a>\u00a0(2019). He has been included in a Phaidon Press anthology of contemporary photography called\u00a0Vitamin Ph<\/a>\u00a0and contributed essays to LACMA\u2019s groundbreaking text,\u00a0Words Without Pictures<\/a>. He has been included included in both an Aperture anthology organized by Charlotte Cotton called\u00a0Photography is Magic, which addresses a major technological shift in contemporary photographic practices, as well as the anthology entitled\u00a0Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Zaki has an ongoing interest in the rhetoric of authenticity, as it is associated with photography as an indexical media. Simultaneously, he is deeply invested in exploring digital technology\u2019s transformative potential to disrupt that assumed authenticity. However, his interest is not in utilizing digital trickery as illustration to undermine a photograph\u2019s veracity. In fact, Zaki often creates hybridized photographs that carefully use the vocabulary of the documentary style so that the viewer\u2019s belief in its veracity remains intact, at least initially. He constructs scenes that are somewhat off-register, \u2018out of key\u2019, and ever so slightly faux. He often uses the architectural and organic landscape of California as a subject, as it seems particularly appropriate to his process. This is largely because, either through media myth, reality or a combination of the two, the architecture and surrounding landscape in California is itself an evolving bastardization of styles and forms, in other words a pastiche. California is home to a collision of high modernist ideals, suburban McMansions, high-rise density, endless asphalt grids, deserts, mountains, beaches, Los Angeles urbanism, Inland Empire sprawl, Orange Curtain conservatism, the Crystal Cathedral, and the Integratron. It should be made clear that although Zaki is fascinated and inspired by this architectural and cultural entropy, his intention is not to record, replicate or simply document a preexisting postmodern pastiche. More precisely, his work begins with the familiar, by looking at objects, structures and locations that are often pedestrian and banal. And by capitalizing on the presumed veracity that photographs continue to command, along with the transformative, yet invisible digital alterations he employs, his images depict structures that that aspire to be added to the list of the hodge-podge built landscape that creates the California mythology.[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n<\/section>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[vc_row padding_bottom=”50″][vc_column width=”1\/4″][\/vc_column][vc_column width=”3\/4″][vc_column_text]Amir Zaki is a practicing artist living in Southern California. He received his MFA from\u00a0UCLA\u00a0in 1999 and has been regularly exhibiting nationally and internationally since. Zaki has had over 30 solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries including the\u00a0Mak Center Schindler House, the\u00a0Doyle…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":40704,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-51537","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51537","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51537"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51537\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57854,"href":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51537\/revisions\/57854"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/40704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/art.ucr.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51537"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}