Join us for a special conversation between photographer Amir Zaki and Tyler Stallings, Director Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College.

Continuing Amir Zaki’s dedication to photographing built and natural landscapes, Empty Vessel is a multi-year project composed of two interrelated bodies of photographic images that create a tension between the fragility of broken ceramic vessels and the solidity of quintessential California concrete skateparks. Selections of the works are currently installed at the Culver Center of the Arts (https://ucrarts.ucr.edu/Exhibition/empty-vessel ) at UC Riverside through October 4, 2020; Empty Vessel—Amir Zaki was originally organized by the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion, Orange Coast College, and curated by Tyler Stallings. Zaki’s work is an extension of the New Topographic photographers from the 1970s by extending their focus on our human-made environment into the suburban and exurban environments throughout Southern California.

The body of work is accompanied by Zaki's first internationally distributed monograph, “California Concrete: A Landscape of Skateparks,” published by Merrell Publishers, with essays by the artist, famed skateboarder Tony Hawk, and Los Angeles-based architect Peter Zellner.