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Empty Vessel bowl number 9 FORM. Variable Edition 2019. These were molded out of concrete from a rock the size of my skull. There are 49 and each is unique with its own title. They come in a very beautiful box along with a poster and a photograph printed on Japanese rice paper. There are a good number of them left. I would like to offer them to individuals or institutions like libraries for any donation you can afford. Please contact me if you are interested.
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Congratulations to Professor Davis Smith-Brecheisen on the publication of Mode of Address: The Modernist Novel and Theory After Postmodernism, which is officially out from SUNY Press! Follow this link for more info or to order a copy: sunypress.edu/Books/M/Mode-of-Address
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This one requires an RSVP (maybe because there will be drinks?). You can find an eventbrite link for that on the post about it here: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs
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Many thanks to @__matthewporter__ for letting me reflect, recount, and go on record about photography, art, and those mentioned below. Link to episode in bio. 00:09:50: @ginnycook90065 helping me understand various camera formats, early days working in graphic design and travel photography, and taking continuing education classes in photo 00:12:30: #arthurou recommending that I look at New Topographics 00:15:05: #jeffwall 00:16:30: Post-studio critique class at @calartsmfa 00:21:30: @autodidasker 00:27:20: Assisting @shazebner 00:28:00: #allansekula and staged tableau 00:30:50: #allansekula stating that “the history of photography is a history of madness - a history of people’s mad relationship to photographs.” 00:40:00: Responding to the financial collapse of 2008 00:42:00: Group show at Marvelli Gallery with @robertsonmariah, @autodidasker, @taliachetrit, @thevanitygallery, and @tamarhalpern 00:46:00: @__matthewporter__ on the longevity of galleries 00:47:10: @bennmichaels’ role in informing my works on inkjet media 00:47:30: Indexicality 00:49:00: Assisting @darcy_hemley_photography 00:51:30: @wallspace_nyc 00:53:30: Post-Internet art, Zombie Formalism, and Big Fun Art 00:58:00: Conceiving of Aught Fraught as a period and not a movement 1:00:20: @pimcharlottecotton, @apkapkapk, and Words Without Pictures 1:00:45: @lucasblalock stating that you can bracket the Aught Fraught period with @pimcharlottecotton's books 1:01:55: The importance of Words Without Pictures 1:06:30: @soo_kim_studio 1:08:20: @jamescwelling and Los Angeles 1:13:00: Working in Cultural Heritage imaging at @uclalibrary 1:17:20: Mark Wyse’s exhibitions, “Disavowal” and “Seizure” 1:20:10: Matt recounting a funny moment with Mark, @_hannahwhitaker, and @soo_kim_studio 1:21:40: @penumbrafoundation and @aipadphoto 1:24:10: @joshschaedel and @the_fulcrum_press; @spa_shorts and @leroys_happy_place; @petertomkat and @nomoonla; and @t_i_m_e_s_h_a_r_e 1:24:30: Incorrectly believing that the Aught Fraught period was infinite 1:34:00: @peter_holzhauer, the photo world, and the art world
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Sample 4-page spreads of the interview and essay at the end of the book. Building + Becoming. 2022. Double gatefold. Survey monograph. Published by X Artists’ Books + DoppleHouse Press. Co-published with DoppelHouse Press, Amir Zaki’s Building + Becoming brings together 272 pages of full color work by the Orange County, CA–based hyperrealist photographer, accompanied by an interview with curator and writer Corrina Peipon and an essay co-authored by critics Jennifer Ashton and Walter Benn Michaels. Building + Becoming is a sculptural monograph, designed as a double gatefold which opens to a full width of roughly forty inches, allowing the reader to explore both sets of images and texts in different combinations. (This song took on a whole new meaning of late)
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Sample 4-page spreads. Building + Becoming. 2022. Double gatefold. Survey monograph. Published by X Artists’ Books + DoppleHouse Press. Co-published with DoppelHouse Press, Amir Zaki’s Building + Becoming brings together 272 pages of full color work by the Orange County, CA–based hyperrealist photographer, accompanied by an interview with curator and writer Corrina Peipon and an essay co-authored by critics Jennifer Ashton and Walter Benn Michaels. Building + Becoming is a sculptural monograph, designed as a double gatefold which opens to a full width of roughly forty inches, allowing the reader to explore both sets of images and texts in different combinations.
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#swipeleft⬅️ Building + Becoming. 2022. Double gatefold. Survey monograph. Published by X Artists’ Books + DoppleHouse Press. Co-published with DoppelHouse Press, Amir Zaki’s Building + Becoming brings together 272 pages of full color work by the Orange County, CA–based hyperrealist photographer, accompanied by an interview with curator and writer Corrina Peipon and an essay co-authored by critics Jennifer Ashton and Walter Benn Michaels. Building + Becoming is a sculptural monograph, designed as a double gatefold which opens to a full width of roughly forty inches, allowing the reader to explore both sets of images and texts in different combinations. The multiple series by Zaki captured within these sets address, respectively, the built and the natural, including rocks, carvings, suspended landscapes, and manipulated California beach architecture. Like his skateparks these environments are uncannily quiet and devoid of people.
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Crow swipe. For Walter Benn Michaels. You have to put in the work now.
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Look, Ma!
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I'm delighted and honored to announce that my book, Building + Becoming, 2022 co-published by X Artists' Books and DoppelHouse Press received a first-place Gold Award for Best Photography Book Design from PubWest for 2022. Chris Svensson - Design Tony Manzella/Echelon - Color Ofset Yapimevi - Printing/Binding Corrina Peipon, Walter Benn Michaels, and Jennifer Ashton - Contributing Writers
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Reflecting back on the writings from those who have profoundly helped me understand the implications of my unfixed works. Writing in 2012 for nonsite.org, James Welling generously parsed the differences between photograms and contact prints, shared his curatorial plans that would later materialize in 2013, and discussed the works of other artists who I was honored to be associated with. @jamescwelling Excerpt below. Pictures, Unfixed, on view until January 21 @the_fulcrum_press. "[M]any of the component units of Cache, Active are not photograms but photographic contact prints. So what is the difference between a photogram and a contact print? A photogram is made without a photographic positive or negative. An object shadows the sensitized surface/paper to produce an image. A contact print is created when the sensitized surface/paper is put in contact with a photographic positive or negative. The “contact print” is frequently opposed to prints made with a photographic enlarger because contacts are sharper than prints made by enlargement."
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Reflecting back on the writings from those who have profoundly helped me understand the implications of my unfixed works. Walter Benn Michaels' analysis on the function of meaning with the works have always been invaluable in how to navigate that inevitable relationship between photography, capital, labor, and material. I’m grateful that he discussed this in The Beauty of a Social Problem from 2015. Published by @uchicagopress. @bennmichaels Excerpt below. Pictures, Unfixed, on view until January 21 @the_fulcrum_press. “Whether or not he wishes there were no such things as commodities, he can’t, as an artist, want his art not to be a commodity—you can’t be an artist if you can’t sell your work, nor can you produce art if you don’t produce it for the market. What the artist can want, however, is for his art not to be just a commodity. There are things the artist can’t do. He can’t determine the price at which it sells or the uses to which it’s put; he can’t control the effects it generates. And in an art that imagines itself to affirm matter and refuse form, both the impossibility and the irrelevance of this control are thematized, not to say celebrated. But, of course, the work of art can also have one thing that the commodity and sheer matter cannot. And that one thing—the only thing about the work of art that is not determined by its buyers, the only thing about it that belongs only to it, the only thing about it that’s not reducible to the commodity it otherwise is—is its meaning.”
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