OCMA | Orange County Museum of Art

Born in Beaumont, California in 1974, Amir Zaki received his MFA from UCLA in 1999 and has been regularly and actively exhibiting photographs and videos nationally and internationally since. Zaki has participated in OCMA exhibitions including the 2006 California Biennial and Imaging and Imagining California, (2007) and the museum owns a series of fourteen of his photographs.
Zaki?s work examines the modern, built environment of Southern California, structures that at first may appear banal, but become complex because of the tension between the presumed ?truth? of photography and the invisible digital alterations he employs. 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?s transformative potential to disrupt that assumed authenticity. While this may initially sound like a standard and tired postmodern trope, his interest is not in utilizing digital trickery as illustration to undermine a photograph?s veracity. In fact, Zaki often creates hybridized photographs that carefully use the vocabulary of the documentary style so that the viewer?s belief in its veracity remains intact, at least initially. He construct scenes that are somewhat off-register, `out of key?, and ever so slightly faux. He often uses the architectural landscape of Southern 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 Southern California is itself an evolving bastardization of styles and forms, in other words a pastiche. Southern 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 Southern California mythology.