Saif Azzuz
PRESS RELEASE
Saif Azzuz: Huem-chor O’ weych-pues (Welcome to where the rivers meet)
17 March – 22 April 2022
Anthony Meier Fine Arts is pleased to announce Saif Azzuz: Huem-chor O’ weych-pues (Welcome to where the rivers meet), the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, on view from 17 March – 22 April 2022. Working with a variety of natural materials and incorporating traditional Yurok art-making techniques, Saif Azzuz confronts the ongoing effects of colonialism.
The exhibition will also be accompanied by a live talk with artist Firelei Báez on 11 April 2022 at 10 am PST / 1 pm EST.
The title of the exhibition takes its name from a greeting wall in Weitchpec, CA where the Yurok community resides. To date, the privatization of stolen land is the largest burden on all Indigenous peoples trying to steward their ancestral lands. Through constructing a sense of home within the gallery, Azzuz subverts the inaccessibility faced by his people for generations, subsequently showcasing the resilience of Yurok culture and the importance of personal connection with the land.
Azzuz’s work responds to the impact of colonization, dams and the privatization of nature on the California landscape. Traditional ecological knowledge––different ways Indigenous communities have interacted with the land since time immemorial –– is at the core of the artist’s work, and is evident through a series of “remembered landscapes,” rubbing paintings, and sculptures that populate the gallery space. Made at different locations throughout present-day Weitchpec, the rubbing paintings are created from reliefs that are found on bridges or pieces of concrete that represent a different pattern and story for the Yurok tribe. In his paintings, Azzuz repurposes the color palettes from the drought and fire maps from California in 2021 to create surreal landscapes that are full and alive, that press their power up to the very edges of the canvas, resisting their frames.
About Saif Azzuz:
Saif Azzuz (b. 1987) is a Libyan-Yurok artist who resides in Pacifica, CA. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in 2013. Azzuz has exhibited widely in the Bay Area, including exhibitions at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, Pt.2 Gallery, Adobe Books, Ever Gold [Projects], NIAD, Rule Gallery and 1599dt Gallery. Azzuz is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and has participated in the Clarion Alley Mural Project and the Facebook Artist in Residence program.
Selected public collections include Renni Museum, de Young Museum - Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Facebook, North Carolina Museum of Art, Stanford Health Care Art Collection and UBS Art Collection.