Michael Zheng’s iphone rothko begins with an act that has become almost invisible through repetition: holding up an iPhone to photograph the world. In iPhone in Nature, however, Zheng makes the familiar gesture itself the subject of the photograph. We see the phone held up to the landscape, with an image of nature appearing on its screen while the physical landscape remains visible around it. The photograph contains both the world and its digital representation, making visible the mediation that ordinarily disappears from view.

Zheng extends a history of artists who have used photography to transform our relationship to nature. Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, his photographs of clouds made in the 1920s and ’30s, turned external observation into images of internal states. Andy Goldsworthy likewise uses photography to extend encounters with ephemeral works that change and disappear. Zheng brings this history into the digital present, where the iPhone is not simply a camera but a screen and an instrument through which experience is filtered.

In iphone rothko, placing an iPhone against a reproduction of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase produces a Rothko-like abstraction. Positioned against packages of “pure honey” and Sweet’N Low, the same phenomenon occurs: the ordinary becomes abstract, and almost anything can suddenly resemble a Rothko. The distinctions between original and reproduction, high art and everyday commodity, begin to dissolve.

The title invokes Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and its question of what happens to an artwork’s aura when images can be endlessly reproduced. But Zheng seems less interested in the disappearance of aura than in its transformation. Meaning proliferates: an image becomes another image, and the boundaries between art and the world around it become unstable.