My series Plateaus: Banished from Drowning Series is an ongoing, non-linear series currently composed of five photographs that reflects on a Sufi principle called “qayummia” which means creation in every moment. Plateaus expands on the process I followed while creating ‘Periodic Table (aka Drowning)’ where I used gaffer tape as a medium to draw on a surface, and created a new abstraction of that drawing through the compositional lens of the camera. However, the primary difference between the two bodies of work is that Plateaus utilized a digital scanner which significantly shifted the scale and opened up possibilities for new work compared to Periodic Table which is a linear and generative series that only utilized a camera.
The use of those tools – the camera and the scanner, reproduces light differently in the images they produce. The camera, a traditional handheld one, allowed me freedom of movement where lighting and the angle of the camera changed the composition. While the scanner heightens the role of the camera as an “archiving machine,” eliminating additional human intervention as much as possible.
These works build on the aesthetic and historical contexts of experimental filmmaking, minimalism, conceptualism, and repetition in Islamic geometric art. The tactile layering of instances within the photographs entices the senses despite the flatness of the surface, while the inclusion of intentional lens flares capture an ephemeral other worldly existence.
You can purchase works from this series on Artwork Archive and Saatchi