Idealizations, romance, mystery, and anticipation are things suspended in distances, always beyond reach. My most recent sculptures have dealt with the study of place and myth, as they shape our sense of self. The identity of a place and its people is reciprocal: places identify a people as much as people identify a place. Places are defined by more than their geological boundaries; they are also shaped by historical events. My work engages with the uncanny, relying on an internal logic that creates a sense of believability without recognition. Reference to my private worlds and my Arabic heritage is met with reference to public histories and American pop culture. Personal myth and public facts, personal facts and pubic myths are interwoven and complicated. I find inspiration from Arabic folklore, Victorian fashion, children’s video games, Rococo and Baroque styles, Gothic and Classical architecture, and the theatrical sets of Disney World, Dr. Seuss, and science fiction. My most current work melds my romantic idealizations of far-off places with my sometimes romantic relationship with my native country, Syria. The relationship between sense and nonsense, logic and imagination, is spitefully interdependent. I want to create a sense of nonsensical logic, and get as close to myth and “impossibility” as I can. In the end, the principal of proposition is more valuable to me than the proposition itself, a critical problem more valuable than the solution. Sometimes it is important that contest may not find resolve, as long as there is an argument, an alternative. All things that can be imagined are logical possibilities—conceivable even if improbable in our universe. As it must stand then, if I can't have an inherent contradiction, I'll take an apparent one.