Edward Cella Art & Architecture presents an exhibition of new works by Amir Zaki. This is the artist’s first solo project with the gallery and features three works from his newest series Getting Lost (2017). Using “hybrid photography,” or a combination of digital and analog technologies, Zaki transforms his images in color, form, and atmosphere into striking large-format compositions.

In Getting Lost, Zaki pairs trees in a series of nocturnes, illuminated in conversation with one another against the night sky. The works in the series were made by using a Gigapan machine, which allows the artist to stitch together multiple photographic images. The resulting compositions, each comprised of 15 to 30 images, are meticulously printed by the artist and offer the viewer far more detail than the naked eye can see. Zaki’s methods, which bridge early long-exposure photographic techniques and digital technologies, create works that he explains “appear to be wholly instantaneous, yet reveal subtle clues regarding their extended temporality.”

Based in Los Angeles, Amir Zaki explores the urban landscape across a range of media including photography, sound, and video. Reflecting his ongoing interest in the rhetoric of authenticity as it relates to photography as indexical medium, Zaki uses the transformative potential of digital technology to disrupt that presumed authenticity. In an interview the artist states: “My intention is not to fool the viewer, but to present assertions that lead to questions about the nature of the veracity of the images I’m presenting.” By rendering visible these otherwise concealed night scenes, Zaki invites the viewer to reconsider elements of our surrounding landscape we tend to pass with little consideration.

Amir Zaki received his MFA from UCLA in 1999 and has been regularly and actively exhibiting photographs and videos nationally and internationally since. He has had solo shows at the MAK Center Schindler House in West Hollywood, ACME gallery in Los Angeles, Perry Rubenstein Gallery in New York, James Harris Gallery in Seattle, and Roberts and Tilton in Los Angeles. He has been included in many group exhibitions in significant venues including The California Biennial: 2006 at the Orange County museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Andreas Grimm Gallery in Munich, Germany, and the San Jose Museum of Art. Zaki’s work is part of numerous public and private collections across the country including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, UCLA Hammer Museum, the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, Washington, the Orange County museum of Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Recently, he has been included in both an Aperture anthology organized by Charlotte Cotton called “Photography is Magic,” as well as the anthology titled “Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles.”