Josema Zamorano

b. in Tepic, Mexico. lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
CV

Zamorano’s work often deals with a critique of the languages used by modernity to construct reality: the camera, the method, the image, the concrete. In experimental and some times performative or interactive ways he explores how the movement of eyes, body, and comprehension, in a changing world, transform and connect appearances and meanings.

He worked as a telecommunications engineer before making a turn to the arts. An early love for the fantastical developed as engagement with studies on invisible radio waves and philosophy of science, but also in poetry, existential philosophy, visual arts, and the stories of ancestral Nahuatl culture in Mexico. He did graduate studies at the National University of Mexico (UNAM), University of Surrey (UK), and holds a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies (University of British Columbia).

With composers Meredith Bates and Lief Hall he co-created Sound Migrations performance at New Forms Fest (2021) and Western Front (2020) in Vancouver. Solo exhibitions: La Mirada Transmuta lo Tocado at Página en Blando Gallery (Mexico City 2019), Encounters at Tapir Gallery (Berlin 2019), Encounters at Mónica Reyes Gallery for Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver 2019); Incurable Océano at Página en Blando Gallery (Mexico City 2018), Un-foldings / Des-pliegues at Sala del Mercado de la Merced (Rota Bahía de Cádiz, Spain 2017); Sandokai: Grasping at Things is Surely Delusion, at Back Gallery Project for Capture Photography Festival (Vancouver 2016), and Lost Steps at Jamaa El Fna, at Back Gallery Project (Vancouver 2015). With dancer Eleanor Hendriks he co-created “Trans-Versus“ for Thirstdays #3: Harbour/Heaven at VIVO Media Arts Centre (Vancouver 2016). Zamorano is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.

PAST EXHIBITIONS at MÓNICA REYES GALLERY
Josema Zamorano | Encounters
Curated by Annie Briard for the Vancouver Capture Photography Festival | | April, 2019

Exhibition view "Encounters" at MRG (left) and exhibition view of "Encouters" at Taipir Gallery Berlin | 2019

At once constructing and appealing to a common understanding of space, photography has a long-standing role in documentary practice. Theories abound regarding the fabrication of truth and the position of the artist in relation to the image-as-document such as in street photography —a genre alluded to by the works presented in Encounters. Yet in such photographs spaces are generally depicted as static, their animation is seldom considered.

Josema Zamorano’s work highlights fluctuations in the appearance of space and responds to how we come to know place as lived experience. The gestural layering and repeated folding back onto itself of place, as recorded in these images, results from the artist’s photographic approach, which he calls “spatial sculpting.” Using the photographic apparatus as a sensorial extension of his body, the artist moves about the spaces he encounters, scanning the scene back and forth in an ongoing negotiation of the street as a living and ever shifting locale. This form of inquiry mirrors the perceptual act itself, tracing the saccades of the eye as it consumes visual inputs. Through a methodology rooted in existential phenomenology, Zamorano looks at the ephemeral space between the world and ourselves. Here, the task is not depicting reality but rather investigating and documenting the fleeting experience of seeing of what constructs our world.

In this solo exhibition, which includes prints, installation, and interactive sculptural objects, Zamorano presents renderings of his encounters with space in the streets of Berlin. This show was also exhibited at Tapir Gallery in Berlin during June 2019.

Encounters #1 | Installation | Pigment print on cold-press cotton paper Installation | Spread 44x105.5 in. | Ed. of 3 + AP

Encounters #1 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x41 in. framed | 17x37.5 in. unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Evanescent Space Berlin #17 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x41 in. framed | 17x37.5 unframed | Ed. of 5 + AP

Evanescent Space Berlin #20 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x41 in. framed | 17x37.5 unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Evanescent Space Berlin #40 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x41 in. framed | 17x37.5 unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Encounters #2 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x27.5 in. framed | 17x24.5 unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Evanescent Space Berlin #7 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x27.5 in. framed | 17x24.5 unframed | Ed. of 5 + AP

Encounters #3 Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x27.5 in. framed | 17x24.5 unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Encounters #3 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x27.5 in. framed | 17x24.5 unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Evanescent Space Berlin #1 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x27.5 in. framed | 17x24.5 unframed | Ed. of 5 + AP

Evanescent Space Berlin #2 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x27.5 in. framed | 17x24.5 unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Evanescent Space Berlin #3 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x27.5 in. framed | 17x24.5 unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Evanescent Space Berlin #14 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x27.5 in. framed | 17x24.5 unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Evanescent Space Berlin #13 | Pigment print on watercolor Hahnemuhle paper | 20x27.5 in. framed | 17x24.5 unframed | Ed. of 6 + AP

Josema Zamorano | Sandokai: Grasping at Things Is Surely Delusion (2016)
Curated by Manuel Piña-Baldoquín for Capture Photography Festival, 2016

Sandokai is a poem by Zen master Sekito Kisen (Chinese Shitou Xiqian 700-790 CE). A key Zen text, it is chanted daily in temples around Japan and the world. Extravagantly polysemous, it expresses, among other things, the merging of the relative and the absolute, of difference and unity, of reality and perspective.

This photographic exploration of space evokes one of Sandokai's lines: "Grasping at things is surely delusion." Aiming to subvert a ubiquitous premise of the photographic image throughout the history of street photography and into the age of social media —fixing appearances— this work is an attempt to find ways to un-fix iconic depictions and release the perspectives of lived space. Japan, with its multiple, every-day, modes of perception, from technological sophistication to spiritual connectedness to the natural world, was the breeding ground for this experimental, in-situ, reconstructions of public space.

These negotiated conjunctions of time and space also call forth a fundamental premise of Japan’s Shinto. According to this tradition, the Utsushiyo (visible or material world) and Reikai (invisible world of spirits) are part of one another. Events in both realms have a consequence over reality as a whole. There is a locus that brings together the visible, the invisible, and the imagined worlds.