I read recently that, for architects, the word celebrate means “to design something which empathetically highlights a particular feature of itself or its surroundings.” Through an art residency in North Africa, I got to walk the streets of many unfamiliar cities and cultures. I found myself processing the language barrier, political tension, and tourism in many of these places in contrast to my Western upbringing. In this series of semi-representational mixed media works, I aimed to empathize with each city by capturing its personality. Please click through to see my heart for this nation and its people.
Arabic Muslim architecture has its own language. To learn how to speak visually about each city, I worked in abstraction before shifting more towards representational. Some of the cities represented below are drafts of the work shown above.
