James Harris Gallery | Photo L.A. Art Fair

Photo L.A. Art Fair - Santa Monica, CA

January 29, 2019—February 4, 2019 | Jan 31 - Feb 3, 2019, Santa Monica, CA

We are pleased to announce that James Harris Gallery will be featuring selected works by represented artists Amir Zaki, Mark McKnight, and Bing Wright at the upcoming Photo L.A. art Fair.

Photo L.A. is a collaborative platform that links the international photography community with world-class artists / photographers, galleries, dealers, & publishers. Internationally recognized, yet abundantly accessible, Photo L.A. cultivates connections between industry elite and up-and-coming talent alike. The longest running international photographic art fair on the West Coast, Photo L.A. has been in operation for nearly three decades.

That art fair received a new home in the historic Barker Hangar this year. The airplane hangar’s soaring vaulted ceilings, arched steel trusses, and sweeping 35,000 square foot event space will host a roster of 50-65 local and international galleries and dealers, individual artists, collectives, leading not-for-profits, museums, art schools, and global booksellers.

https://www.photola.com/index....

A firm believer in the transformative power of the photographic image, Zaki images are rooted in the history of the medium and uses it to shed light on the means of representation. Over the last 16 years, Zaki has pushed the physicality of the photograph’s two dimensional construct, allowing it to exist on its own and also exploring its own object-ness. In order to capture and record the original site, Zaki’s representations depict the complexity of place in terms of interactive evolving experience, an ongoing ecological intervention. The artist responds to the shifting contemporary landscape where nothing is permanent, constructing his own visual language to illustrate an entire mythology of place.

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 a full professor at the 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.

Mark McKnight practice is an ongoing engagement with the craft and materials of “traditional” black and white photography. Through careful use of the fundamental tools of his medium—framing, composition, use of light and shadow—he produces an embellished reality through bleak, darkly printed photographs that foreground his subjective, existential, and poetic concerns.

Mark McKnight (b. Valencia, California, 1984) is an artist based in Los Angeles whose work has been exhibited and published throughout the United States and in Europe.Most recently, he was an artist in residence at Shandaken, Storm King Art Center, NY. In 2017, he published NOUNS, a book of photographs that was released at the LA Art Book Fair. Most recently, his work was exhibited at Park View, Los Angeles, 2017; BBQLA, Los Angeles, 2017; Human Resources, Los Angeles, 2017 and Arturo Bandini, Los Angeles, 2017. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at the Riverside Art Museum, Riverside, 2015; and Strongroom, Los Angeles, 2015. Previously his work has been included in exhibitions at OPEN HOUSE, Los Angeles, 2016; The Pit, Glendale, 2016; M+B, Los Angeles, 2015; Christophe Guye, Zurich, 2015; Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles, 2013; Riverside Art Museum, 2013; Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles, 2010; San Francisco Arts Commission, 2009; and as part of the New York Photo Festival, 2008, among others. In 2009 he traveled to Finland on a Fulbright Scholarship. He earned his BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007, and his MFA at UC Riverside in 2015.

Wright has always been fascinated by the correlation between the photo and a mirror, both being silver based picture planes. At the beginning of his artistic career, Wright was exposed to the potential of the medium by John Szarkowski’s legendary exhibition Mirror and Windows in 1978, which reconstructed the framework of the photographic image as a two-dimensional pictorial surface into a conceptual space. With a postmodern perspective of the photographic image, the medium expanded into diverse practices that continue to reorient our relationship to photography.

Bing Wright was born in Seattle in 1958 and received a Bachelor of Arts in Art History from Columbia University, New York. His work been shown in exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; White Columns, New York; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; and the Tang Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, among others. His work is in several public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Portland Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase Bank, and Citigroup. Wright recently curated an exhibition of 1970s photography from the collection of the Washington Art Consortium. He lives and works in New York City.