Hi everyone,
This post is the start of a two month long sharing of where the ENEMIES Project came from and my process of creating works out of the material I’ve gathered in ENEMIES. I’ll end this set of posts with a showing of my most current works.
This summer I have ended up not taking a trip for the project so that I can work with some of the material that I have, and plan the next stage. In my last post I put up a video of a talk I gave this spring about my career leading up to ENEMIES. Shortly after that I gave another talk specifically about the ENEMIES project and it’s aftermath in my own life. There was no video from that talk, so I’ll recreate it for this blog. Keep an eye out for it.
At the end of the talk in my last post I mentioned that my next trip would be into territory where I am the enemy. My plan had been to travel through Pakistan and Afghanistan by motorcycle with companions from the region. I am still researching this trip, but these countries have recently become significantly more dangerous. I have some contacts in both, and am monitoring the volatility of the situation over there. In the meantime I am applying for a Fulbright to work abroad for a year.
Works and Process:
My work is evolving fast, and my website has not kept up while I have been on the road. It seems as though artists always try to create a public persona, but my preference is to open myself wide to the process and emotions behind what I am doing. I am endeared to the community that follows me and my work. It is incredibly important to me, and although the works are getting more and more personal, I see this community as somehow intertwined with my own creative process in a way that cannot be easily explained.
The image here is from one of the most recent sets of works to come out of ENEMIES. I call these “Harsh Paradise”. They are portraits of Kashmiris that I projected onto unseen locations here in the US and then photographed the projections. There is no audience but me. I’ll get to these more in a later post, but briefly, this was my way of expressing what I heard in Kashmir – a people who feel that their struggles are unseen in the world.
In the next post I’ll talk about some of the experiences that led me to start working on ENEMIES.
