Melancholic adult eyes peer through an ancient jade mask that seems about to speak its story. The young scholar holds a dog-eared Arabic text and whose pocket (labeled “one”) seems to gesture toward the distant mountains of the Badlands. Isolated and passing through this desert space, s/he meets our gaze—as does the all-knowing eye in the locket hanging from the potted bonsai tree. Artifice and the search for deeper meaning meet, but don’t seem to resolve in this lonely place.
Collection of Toledo Federation for the Arts, Toledo, OH