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| Zoë Zimmerman, Quarantine #59 (Day #75), 2020, Archival pigment print, 16x20″, Edition of 24, $1200 |
This week at photo-eye, we are thrilled to premiere a new project from gallery artist Zoë Zimmerman entitled Covid Vanitas.
Though Zoë Zimmerman is most well known for her masterful albumen prints, her newest work consists of rich and moody digital still lives that continue to showcase the timeless and elegant sensibility of the artist.
For Covid Vanitas, Zimmerman draws upon the compositional influences of art history. The term “Vanitas” refers to a particular type of still life imagery that is not dissimilar to the melodramatic stylings associated with the “Memento mori” genre. However, instead of focusing solely on the symbology associated with death and departing (a la those attached to Memento mori), Vanitas paintings are also known to include things that have the potential to bring us fleeting pleasure, most notably featuring objects concerning food, flowers and sex.
This genre feels particularly resonant for still lifes that deal with the feelings and emotional impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic. With nowhere else to go, the artist began making these images alone in her New Mexico studio every day, ruminating on the things that she was surrounded by and the feelings that she was stuck with.
Zimmerman's take on the Vanitas genre brings us photographs that are somehow sparse but dense; maybe it's the intensity of the charcoal grey and black backgrounds that the artist strategically uses as a means of holding the series together, or maybe it's the density of the meaning of the artist's careful selection of subject that carries the photograph.
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| Zoe Zimmerman, Quarantine #23 (Day #20), 2020, Archival pigment print, 16x20", Edition of 24, $1200 |
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| Zoe Zimmerman, Quarantine #46 (Day #57), 2020, Archival pigment print, 16x20″, Edition of 24, $1200 |
In the image above, expired dandelions are presented with lab-esque precision. These flowers, though well past their golden prime, are full of wishes and, therefore, possibility. Zoë Zimmerman uses the cultural weight of this wishing flower to communicate that which became all-too-familiar over the course of the early pandemic. The image reads as a visual metaphor for the constant struggle of balancing our desires with our reality, which feels particularly precarious when one half of the contents of the scale could blow away at any second.
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| Zoë Zimmerman, Quarantine #13 (Day #17), 2020, Archival pigment print, 20x20″, Edition of 24, $1200 |
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| Zoë Zimmerman, Quarantine #39 (Day #47), 2020, Archival pigment print, 20x20″, Edition of 24, $1200 |
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| Zoë Zimmerman, Quarantine #60 (Day #76), 2020, Archival pigment print, 20x20″, Edition of 24, $1200 |
To learn more about Zoë Zimmerman and her work, explore the links below!