Water tank photos to be featured at MCE gallery

For the month of April, the Maricopa Center for Entrepreneurship will feature photographs from longtime Maricopa resident Gary Zaimont.

“I work in different areas because nothing is the same,” Zaimont said. “A painting is not a picture and a picture is not a woodcut. With photography, you work with what you find and not so much with what you planned. You may only get a full moon once. You have to work with what’s out there.”

The show opens Wednesday.

Zaimont has been a member of the Maricopa community since 2005. He is largely self-taught, and has been drawing and painting since he was a child. His artistic interest is ever expanding, however, and he added woodcutting and photography to his skill set as he grew older.

“We are excited to have Gary featured as his work represents a very unique part of Maricopa,” Maricopa Center for Entrepreneurship Marketing Manager Executive Assistant Sara Troyer stated in a press release. “His entire gallery is focused on the water tank in old town Maricopa, and each photograph features the tank”

Zaimont started working on the water tower collection in 2009. Much of his artistic influence in the photographs was modeled after the “36 Views of Mount Fuji” collection of woodcuts by Katsushika Hokusai (best known for “The Great Wave of Kanagawa). In that particular series of woodcuts, Mount Fuji is a steady presence in a wide array of foregrounds. In most of the prints, the snowcapped mountain nearly blends into the background entirely. Zaimont used a similar style of framing with the water tower in his photographs.

“We don’t have a mountain, we have a water tower,” Zaimont said. “It’s always there, and I drive past it every day. It’s something tall and visible from different areas and different foregrounds.”