I employed Islamic tile motifs to refer to culture in the context of the human desire to express, beautify, and build something meaningful. The patterns repeat and collide with other patterns. They become fragmentary over time through weather, abuse, or neglect. Repairs often reconnect these patterns or remain obvious patches that interrupt the original design. These patterns act as metaphors for what I am most deeply interested in: the chafing of eastern and western culture, how the flow of cultural influences and ideas can be fruitfully streaming one year, violently disrupted the next and slowly rebuilt, a process ongoing for centuries. For this body of work, I have selected patterns from architecture situated at sites of recent conflict and integrated imagery that references the wages of war.
The motifs inevitably will be seen through the lens of the current political climate, in which there is a perceived increase in vulnerability to the destructive powers of war. The development of global positioning systems, satellite imagery and drones makes targets---cities, infrastructure, specific buildings, and people---clearer than ever. These “arts of war” are capable of destroying culture, including the very art that I create.