Audio recording one: a Qatari student interviews her older sister who was wrongly accused of plagiarism while studying at an American university. The conversation centers on how the young woman overcame this experience.
To make an image-translation of the audio interview, I photographed the sun, veiled by clouds, over Doha. The photograph was digitally enhanced and darkened to resemble the Doha sky seen as if through dark sunglasses. I then superimposed a vector drawing, hovering in the sky, of many circles gridded evenly taking the form of an elongated cube. The three-dimensional grid gave me an ordered finite form that offered a poetic parallel for an institutional framework of a university where individuals are organized into a conventional system reminiscent of our Qatari student caught in a system of recriminations.
Seen on edge, the three-dimensional field of circles produces a secondary effect or what is called a moiré pattern. In this instance, the visual results are clearings in the field, a network of radiating paths that depend on an individual’s relative position to the three dimensional object. In this case, I have adapted the moiré, to reference the subjective position of a single individual and the complexity, overlaps, conflicts and paths that may emerge from that individual’s vantage point while navigating a liberal arts education.
The image was conceived as a field without limit, a sky of infinite space, metaphorically similar to the youthful attitude that anything is possible. Counter to this myth, of limitlessness is a finite counter-form, full of collision and secondary paths. The narrative and image demonstrate a sense that negotiating conflict is required for us to understand our power, creativity and individuality.