Josema Zamorano
b. in Tepic, Mexico. lives and works in Vancouver, BC.
download CV
Josema Zamorano is a Mexican-Canadian artist based in Vancouver. He worked as telecommunications engineer before making a turn to the arts. The relation between téchne, art and human comprehension is a continuous concern in his work. Driven by the every-day crowds and intensity of Mexico City he started doing street photography while being a student of Latin American poetry at Mexico’s National University. He moved to Vancouver in 2006. With intersecting interests in poetry, existential philosophy and visual arts he earned a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies (2012) from University of British Columbia. He currently teaches at Capilano University in Vancouver.
Josema has exhibited at several individual shows including: Un-foldings / Des-pliegues(Rota, Bahía de Cádiz, Spain, 2017); Sandokai: Grasping at Things is Surely Delusion, featured at the 2016 Capture Photography Festival, and Lost Steps at Jamaa El Fna, at Back Gallery Project (Vancouver, 2015). He has also participated in several group shows, including: Thirstdays #3: Harbour/Heaven at VIVO Media Arts Centre (2016); and Latin American Art, and Diffractions of the Local at Back Gallery Project (Vancouver, 2015 & 2013). He has also exhibited in Mexico: Traditions and Contradictions at Ferry Building Gallery along with other Mexican-Canadian artists (Vancouver, 2016).
Artist Statement:
I believe the gaze is unfolding understanding. I work with photography and/or arrangements of text to question the identity of places and things by illuminating the movement, transformation and the temporal fluctuation of appearances and meanings.
In the last few years I have created images which are referenced to public space, yet they are a performative transformation or transfiguration of it: the flux of forms in the street includes me as I am performatively shaping it; together we are momentarily this reality. With this, I aim to question the predominant role of photography in solidifying realities in the age of digital production and dissemination of street snapshots. By painting with the camera, I interrogate the common distinction between the direct relation of photography to reality, and the freedom to construct the image in painting. I seek to investigate how the movement of eyes, body and comprehension, in a world which is also changing, constitute fleeting realities that suspend linear readings and accepted representations of public space. This is a way of highlighting the vitality of human intentionality in a world that increasingly favours life as programed automation.
Exhibitions @ Monica Reyes Gallery
Josema Zamorano's Encounters exhibition which opens on Friday, March 29 between 7-9pm, has been curated by Annie Briard for Vancouver's Capture Photography Festival the exhibition will then continue until April 14, 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 that constructs our world.
In this solo exhibition, which includes prints, installation and interactive sculptural objects, Zamorano presents renderings of his encounters with space while on residency in Berlin during the summers of 2016 and 2018. This show will next be exhibited at Tapir Gallery in Berlin this June.
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 the Chinese Zen master Sekito Kisen (700-790 CE). A key Zen text, which 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. Josema’s work in the streets of Japan evoke one of Sandokai's lines: "Grasping at things is surely delusion." Aiming to subvert an ubiquitous premise of the photographic image throughout the history o photography and into the age of social media —fixing appearances— Josema un-fixes reality to release the perspectives therein. He achieves this by performing multiple exposures of alternate gazes and creating, in situ, a single cubist photograph.
Josema’s work also calls 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. As the wavering appearances in these images suggest, Josema’s work is an investigation of the reunion of the visible, the invisible and of imagined worlds.
Sandokai, his second solo show at Back Gallery Project, was featured at the 2016 Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver. He also exhibited Lost Steps at Jamaa El Fna at Back Gallery Project in 2015. He has also participated in several group shows. With the A.K.A. Collective (he is a founding member) he has exhibited in Thirstdays #3: Harbour/Heaven at VIVO Media Arts Centre in 2016; Latin American Art in 2015, and Diffractions of the Local in 2013 (these last two at Back Gallery Project). He has also exhibited in Mexico: Traditions and Contradictions at Ferry Building Gallery in 2016 along with other Mexican-Canadian artists, among other group exhibitions.
Josema has exhibited at several individual shows including: Un-foldings / Des-pliegues(Rota, Bahía de Cádiz, Spain, 2017); Sandokai: Grasping at Things is Surely Delusion, featured at the 2016 Capture Photography Festival, and Lost Steps at Jamaa El Fna, at Back Gallery Project (Vancouver, 2015). He has also participated in several group shows, including: Thirstdays #3: Harbour/Heaven at VIVO Media Arts Centre (2016); and Latin American Art, and Diffractions of the Local at Back Gallery Project (Vancouver, 2015 & 2013). He has also exhibited in Mexico: Traditions and Contradictions at Ferry Building Gallery along with other Mexican-Canadian artists (Vancouver, 2016).
Artist Statement:
I believe the gaze is unfolding understanding. I work with photography and/or arrangements of text to question the identity of places and things by illuminating the movement, transformation and the temporal fluctuation of appearances and meanings.
In the last few years I have created images which are referenced to public space, yet they are a performative transformation or transfiguration of it: the flux of forms in the street includes me as I am performatively shaping it; together we are momentarily this reality. With this, I aim to question the predominant role of photography in solidifying realities in the age of digital production and dissemination of street snapshots. By painting with the camera, I interrogate the common distinction between the direct relation of photography to reality, and the freedom to construct the image in painting. I seek to investigate how the movement of eyes, body and comprehension, in a world which is also changing, constitute fleeting realities that suspend linear readings and accepted representations of public space. This is a way of highlighting the vitality of human intentionality in a world that increasingly favours life as programed automation.
Exhibitions @ Monica Reyes Gallery
Josema Zamorano's Encounters exhibition which opens on Friday, March 29 between 7-9pm, has been curated by Annie Briard for Vancouver's Capture Photography Festival the exhibition will then continue until April 14, 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 that constructs our world.
In this solo exhibition, which includes prints, installation and interactive sculptural objects, Zamorano presents renderings of his encounters with space while on residency in Berlin during the summers of 2016 and 2018. This show will next be exhibited at Tapir Gallery in Berlin this June.
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 the Chinese Zen master Sekito Kisen (700-790 CE). A key Zen text, which 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. Josema’s work in the streets of Japan evoke one of Sandokai's lines: "Grasping at things is surely delusion." Aiming to subvert an ubiquitous premise of the photographic image throughout the history o photography and into the age of social media —fixing appearances— Josema un-fixes reality to release the perspectives therein. He achieves this by performing multiple exposures of alternate gazes and creating, in situ, a single cubist photograph.
Josema’s work also calls 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. As the wavering appearances in these images suggest, Josema’s work is an investigation of the reunion of the visible, the invisible and of imagined worlds.
Sandokai, his second solo show at Back Gallery Project, was featured at the 2016 Capture Photography Festival in Vancouver. He also exhibited Lost Steps at Jamaa El Fna at Back Gallery Project in 2015. He has also participated in several group shows. With the A.K.A. Collective (he is a founding member) he has exhibited in Thirstdays #3: Harbour/Heaven at VIVO Media Arts Centre in 2016; Latin American Art in 2015, and Diffractions of the Local in 2013 (these last two at Back Gallery Project). He has also exhibited in Mexico: Traditions and Contradictions at Ferry Building Gallery in 2016 along with other Mexican-Canadian artists, among other group exhibitions.
Josema Zamorano | Encounters | April, 2019
Josema Zamorano | Sandokai: Grasping at Things Is Surely Delusion (2016)
Josema Zamorano | Lost Steps at Jamaa El Fna (2015)
Jamaa El Fna: Morocco’s most exuberant square, epicentre of Marrakesh. Josema´s errant steps meander through wavering bodies of light, colour, texture. Supervening on the whirl of vendors, masses, shuttling artifacts, the picturesque image of the street appears to impose itself as iconic truth. However, Josema looks suspiciously—there is more to this than these pictorial suspensions. Colour transgresses, overruns the boundaries of all forms. There is another clarity in the confused profusion of shapes and patterns.
By questioning digital precision in his photographs, Josema subverts the ubiquitous use of cameras for direct, directive re-production. Although the camera was designed as a machine for replicating a controlled view of reality, and because the world seems more and more dominated and coordinated by cameras, Josema has fallen upon smearing light through a gestural seizure of images, simultaneously determined and unforeseeable, in an unsettled confluence of spontaneity and precision that hopefully vibrates with the inherent ambiguity of seeing.
http://josemazamorano.com/photography/loststeps.html
Jamaa El Fna: Morocco’s most exuberant square, epicentre of Marrakesh. Josema´s errant steps meander through wavering bodies of light, colour, texture. Supervening on the whirl of vendors, masses, shuttling artifacts, the picturesque image of the street appears to impose itself as iconic truth. However, Josema looks suspiciously—there is more to this than these pictorial suspensions. Colour transgresses, overruns the boundaries of all forms. There is another clarity in the confused profusion of shapes and patterns.
By questioning digital precision in his photographs, Josema subverts the ubiquitous use of cameras for direct, directive re-production. Although the camera was designed as a machine for replicating a controlled view of reality, and because the world seems more and more dominated and coordinated by cameras, Josema has fallen upon smearing light through a gestural seizure of images, simultaneously determined and unforeseeable, in an unsettled confluence of spontaneity and precision that hopefully vibrates with the inherent ambiguity of seeing.
http://josemazamorano.com/photography/loststeps.html
News
Robin Laurence, "Travel photography takes an artful new turn at the Capture fest", The Georgia Straight, March 30, 2016.
http://www.straight.com/arts/667421/travel-photography-takes-artful-new-turn-capture-fest
Robin Laurence, "Travel photography takes an artful new turn at the Capture fest", The Georgia Straight, March 30, 2016.
http://www.straight.com/arts/667421/travel-photography-takes-artful-new-turn-capture-fest