In the series "Slipping into
Night", crumbling buildings made of clay,
reference the massive destruction that has been inflicted upon Aleppo and other
Syrian cities. Millions of people have lost their homes and over half of
Syria's population has been displaced by this crisis.
When looking at news mages of these destroyed cities
I am struck by both the weight and the fragility of the architectural remains. The
skeletal like remains of buildings and the lack of any human presence seems to
take on a ghost like appearance. I have tried to capture this by working faster
and cruder than in previous bodies of work. The dust that covers these broken
cities, has an almost uniform grayness that seems to permeate everything. The color
palette for the project had this in mind, purples and blues bleed into greys
suggesting the dimming light at dusk, while bits of light brush the tops of
buildings. This work attempts to reach out to what Steven Pinker would call The Better Angels of Our Nature to engage the deep moral questions of who we
want to be in the world.
