Amir Zaki

Amir Zaki

Work from Eleven Minus One

“Amir Zaki’s 11-1 meticulously recreates a group of photographs made in the mid-1980s by internationally-renowned Swiss artists David Fischli and Peter Weiss. Fischll and Weissʼ work, which depicts precariously balancing temporary sculptures intentionally constructed in a slap-dash manner, privilege the photographs over the sculptures themselves, a notion Zaki interprets as an ironic inverse of the professional photographic documentation of artwork. In Zaki’s adaptation of Fischll and Weissʼ series, there is a re-inversion at play, but also an additional element of distortion: Zaki refocuses his attention on the sculptures, but uses virtual 3D media to create hyper realistic nonobjects in a eries of short animation loops, a body of photographic prints depicting orthographic views of the 3D models, and a foldout book based on the eleven different ways that a cube can be unfolded. Working with this methodology allows Zaki to question the conventions and limitations of photography by exploring depictions of “real” space, but without the restraints of actual physics or forces such as gravity. He also highlights the perversion of using Fischli and Weissʼ photographs of quickly-made, throw-away sculptures as a source to create incredibly laborious photorealistic scenes that can be explored from all angles, both through photographic and orthographic projections.” – LAXArt