I looked for the root of my name
But I’m split apart by a magic wand.
Do my dreams reveal my visions or my victims?
All the prophets are my kin.
But heaven is still far from its earth
And I am still far from my words.
Mahmoud Darwish,
"On A Canaanite Stone At The Dead Sea"

Do you imagine these partings yield comfort, favor, and hope?
Do you quiver at breaths dispersing as mosquitoes on the wind?

Do you believe this embrace will remain steadfast, reciprocal, resolute? 
Do you perspire in our nearness, closer than the press and the olive engaged?

Do you stand on clay that buries rock, wails, and pride?
Do you claim this place uncommon, and as firm as fingers grasp a hoe?

Do you scent fermentation in the night, the shadow’s stains, and heat’s decay?
Do you heave in hours unendurable, as empty as silence in the sand?

Do you listen to figs falling, and birds flying home?

The exhibition Cleave pivots around contradictory definitions of the word. “Severance,” “gap,” and “schism” are foils for “adhere,” “cling,” and “be faithful to”.  As such, the installation can be experienced as a longing of lovers, the indictments of foes, and the calling forth by and to the departed.

Cleave’s central element is itself divided: a life size levitating and draped figure that is bisected from anus to throat as was the prophet Mohammed in the eighth level of Dante’s hell.  The figure is also beheaded, complicating the dichotomy of a self torn, a dispersed self rent in exile that is neither here nor there.  The severance also connotes a split between the Apollonian and Dionysian, the bestial and the ideal, and the Cartesian separation of the physical from consciousness, creating an absence unfilled, and parts never whole. 

The figure is cast out of black sand, pulled on reins of feathers by a flock of choking mourning doves.  A sole white-winged dove is arrested in flight, burdened by two uprooted olive trees, their fruit lying in ruin.  Sounds of chopping wood, chopping hope, chopping truth, chopping time invades the hush.  Aligned with the dark chasm, Islamic ornamentation weaves heavenward, aligned with the dark chasm.

Cleave is both funereal and transcendent.  It is a lamentation of love and the impossibility of its consummation, petrified in a present that justifies its injustices through a rewritten past.  It is a lamentation from the dead releasing the living from onerous martyrdom, from inhumane conditions of theft, servitude, isolation, curfew, unemployment, starvation, torture, genocide and cultural erasure.  It is a place where beauty dissects itself and where conscience can be reconstituted, where we no longer bury victims in cleaved trenches, with bulldozers of our making, in sacrificial sands of shifting deserted morals.