Reflections; Photography, Various sizes
One of the fundamental concepts underlying Islamic Art and Architecture is the notion of unity within diversity; that although the world appears to be filled with a diverse range of individual, separate things, when in fact there is a larger underlying order that unifies them all. This concept is most clearly visible in the surface treatment of the domes, facades and interiors of many Islamic buildings where ceramic tile and mirror mosaics are composed into endlessly repeating designs and patterns. On the one hand, these patterns veil the physical presence of the building, while they simultaneously echo the idea of a universal order, where the many reflect the one.
For the Reflections series, the composition is created from photos that were taken in a fragmentary fashion with the intention of being recomposed. Consequently, each photo is treated like a tile in a mosaic, and the overall composition is created out of these small, disjointed fragments in order to suggest an impression of the larger image/ space/ place.
This body of work also references traditional Persian miniature paintings, which tend to flatten three-dimensional space into a cacophony of abstract geometric shapes and patterns. The works in this series are less concerned with the recognizable characteristics of an actual place and instead present an altered view of the world/ reality.