AMIR ZAKI

AMIR ZAKI

OCTOBER 19 – NOVEMBER 24, 2007

New York (October 5, 2007) – Based in Los Angeles, artist Amir Zaki pushes the boundaries of the real and the imagined with his depictions of urban California landscapes and architecture. In his new series of photographs ?•, Zaki continues to explore themes of ambiguity and anonymity by displacing but personifying unique architectural structures as subjects. While remaining committed to the depiction of the mundane and pedestrian, Zaki’s ? • is subversive and unnatural, pushing the limits of photographic realism and transforming architecture into relics of an ineffectual world.

Seen in and around Southern California, Zaki’s buildings are mundane constructions transformed from their natural settings through the photographic lens to emphasize their dynamic volumes and sculptural masses in space. Using historicized formats seen in photographic typologies and documentary projects, Zaki challenges this stylistic vocabulary and ‘authentic’ perspective by framing portrait-like images of these buildings that foreground their unique surroundings. Camouflaged into their monolithic facades are obscure, non-descript signage that mysteriously inform yet further alienate the constructions from the familiar. Common churches, shopping malls, gas stations and fast food joints are ultimately rendered functionally ambiguous; their adorning symbols create conflicting connotations that instigate questions as to the true nature of architectural function and symbolic purpose.

Accompanying the photographs are several wall sculptures cut with precision from a thick and dense polyurethane substrate. Here, Zaki has sourced and enlarged obscure, enigmatic symbols that reference and often mimic the adornments seen within some of the photographs. Finished with high gloss colors graphed directly from the buildings on which similar symbols appear and mounted in the exhibition space, these composites are exalted from the mundane into highly considered objects.

Concurrently on view at Perry Rubenstein Gallery 534 West 24 Street is an exhibition by Brooklyn based sculptor Diana Al-Hadid.

Perry Rubenstein

Claire Pestaille


Rokeby is pleased to be announce the second of Claire Pestaille’s solo exhibitions at the gallery.
Pestaille seeks intimacy and understanding, of both the history of painting and its subjects. Through strategies of appropriation, that mix contemporary and historical references from both art and literature, the artist maintains a synthesis of past and present which celebrates an aesthetics beyond the ordinary and the magic of fantasy.

Rokeby Gallery

BIANCA CASADY


BIANCA CASADY
LIL GIRL SLIM “COSMIC WILLINGNESS” PIPE DREAMZ A REVELATION
and the Death of Mad Vicky Lopez

DEITCH

Thomas Demand


Thomas Demand
November 10 – December 8, 2007

Taka Ishii Gallery is pleased to announce our second exhibition with Berlin-based artist,
Thomas Demand. A selection of Demand’s recent solo exhibitions (2007) includes the
Fondazione Prada, Venice and the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, as well as the
Serpentine Gallery, London (2006) and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005).
Demand’s work has been featured in group exhibitions within Japan at the National
Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto / the National Museum of Art Osaka (2006) as well as
the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (2005).

Demand, trained as a sculptor, creates editioned film and photographic works in which
sculptures, constructed from paper and cardboard, are presented in mediated form. With
one recent exception, Demand does not exhibit the sculptural constructions themselves;
but, rather, always re-presents the work as image. This process is analogous to Demand’s
initial choice of source material – a great deal of the image material on which the
artist bases his work is culled from the media; empty spaces in which current or past
events of cultural/political import are presented in an anonymous, simplified form.
While Demand does not hide the background behind each image, he is not forthcoming as
works are typically provided with relatively anonymous, literally descriptive titles
such as “Shed” and “Lightbox.”

The Taka Ishii Gallery exhibition will include the presentation of two recent 35mm films,
Yellowcake and Camera, as well as recent photographic works. “Yellowcake” is a direct
reference to an intermediate step in the processing of uranium ores, and an indirect
reference to an event in which material was obtained from the Embassy of the Republic of
Niger in Rome, subsequently used by the United States and Great Brittain in an attempt to
provide proof of the government of Iraq’s attempts to secure material for the creation
of so-called weapons of mass destruction. While past Demand work was based upon
photogrpahic source material, in this instance no photographic documentation existed and
Demand had to rely upon his memory following a visit to the embassy in preparation for
the constuction of the sculpture. In Yellowcake the film, an interior within the embassy
is pictured; the lights within the space are once turned on and then, a few minutes later,
turned off; this is all that occurs -visibly- within the space of nearly 6 minutes. The
exhibition will also include a photographic detail of the embassy interior
as well as an equally enigmatic image, “Shed” from 2006.

Taka Ishii Gallery
Taka Ishii Gallery

HOBBY HORSE – YEAH, YEAH DADA ASIA


A show curated by Elaine W. Ng, publisher of Art AsiaPacific

HOBBY HORSE – YEAH, YEAH DADA ASIA

explores the work of artists whose practice relies heavily on the use of
appropriated material – beer cans, leather whips, stickers, trees, toy
soldiers, movie titles and wallpaper – as a form of social critique. The
origin of this practice is traced to the Dada movement that began at the
Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, where a small association of radical
artists sought to disrupt meaning through a series of acts that included
critiquing traditional notions of art to exploring language, meaning and the
spectacle within art. Critical, raucous, anarchic, outrageous and
metaphorical, Dada in its various guises railed against the superficiality
and chaos of the world during World War I. Although its originators declared
the movement dead by 1921, the influence of Dada continues and now extends beyond
its European roots.

This group exhibition demonstrates Dada’s lasting impact on artists from the
Asia region today.

Gonkar GYATSO (Tibet)
Kesang LAMDARK (Tibet)
Caroline CHIU (HongKong)
Kin-wah TSANG (Hong Kong)
Jaishri ABICHANDANI (India)
Shezad DAWOOD (Pakistan)
Hiroshi SUNAIRI (Japan)