Seeking Clarity

ACME. is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new photographs by Amir Zaki. In this body of work, the artist returns his focus to the ocean and trees – this time with a more zoomed-in viewpoint. By capturing the ever-changing ocean waves in up-close "slivers" that are abstracted from the surrounding seascape, Zaki creates a very mysterious, disorienting image of a subject that is seemingly obscure and infinite. Zaki quotes Edmund Burke's classic treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful:

"A level plain of a vast extent on land, is certainly no mean idea; the prospect of such a plain may be as extensive as a prospect of the ocean; but can it ever fill the mind with any thing so great as the ocean itself? This is owing to several causes, but it is owing to none more than this, that the ocean is an object of no small terror."

Zaki has a long held interest in the ocean: its depth, obscurity, vastness, uncontrollability, and its apparent infinite extension.

In a second series of photographs, the artist also turns his hyper focus to palm tree seed pods. By focusing on the palm tree seed pods alone and isolating the pods from the palm tree itself, the images transform familiar, botanical matter into something strange and foreign. The palm seed pods are also represented in different stages of 'death' in the separate images. As time passes after it is cut off from the palm tree, it actually expands, instead of withering. By delving ever deeper into familiar subject matter like the ocean and trees, Zaki keeps exposing more mysteries in the everyday.

Amir Zaki lives and works in Southern California. He received his MFA from UCLA in 1999 and has been exhibiting nationally and internationally since graduating. He is an associate professor at University of California at Riverside. His work is included in many museum collections including the Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.