Turning and turning in the widening gyre

  The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst  

  Are full of passionate intensity.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Truth is Contrary is a body of works I began to develop around  2001, post 9/11 and post-Arab Spring, and return to quite often. The body of works (paintings, drawings, video, collage, and text) takes a wider purview at urgent conflicts around the world: fake news, civil disobedience, subversions, terrorism and warfare (overt and covert). Two decades later, war and uprisings across the Middle East remain as timely and potent as ever; the underlying conditions and unrest are as acute and complex.  

I mine, re-contextualize, and interrogate images culled from newspapers, news footage, and archival,  text from poetry, quotes from dissents and political leaders, and news headlines.  I employ various mediums including silkscreen, acrylic paint, graphites, drawings,  transfers, etc, This ongoing body of work is a (p)ostscript on the last two decades and a (p)rologue to the new— The uncertain reality that awaits just around the corner.

Readings that Inspire this body of works are as follows: Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Other; E.M. Cioran, The Temptation To Exist;  Yeats, The Second Coming; Slavoj Žižek, Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors: Against the Double Blackmail; Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues; Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason; Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain; Soygal Rinponce, The Tibetan Book of  Living and Dying.