STATEMENT OF WORK

My recent work involves stone carving and photography, two processes which are indexical and inherently elegiac.  They record and memorialize personal and cultural narratives, their registration instant and irrevocable.

Stone embodies nonhuman and human memory—it is literally skeleton, both planetary and societal, a calcified archive of prior occurrences.  Formed from the crystalized bones of Paleozoic sea life, marble is a geologic snapshot of ancient oceans.  When touched by humans, it becomes a chronicle of our activities, too.  We trace our histories in stone.

As a material, marble is burdened with past narratives which are inextricably linked to power and violence: it is a symbol of Western Imperialism; its very extraction is exploitative of natural resources and human labor; and the reductive acts used to shape it are inherently brutal, requiring destruction in order to create.  As such, I use this medium—normally considered the apogee of permanence—to signal degradation, transience, and loss.  Together with photography, my sculpture frequently references remains: biological, geological and cultural, interwoven with personal and familial histories.  My paternal family, which emigrated from Syria, has informed my broader interest in the notion of de-generation (decline from / loss of one’s kind), when thinking about cultural and personal identities.