I have always been fascinated with in-between states. I think that is partly my personality and partly because I’m Arab American: in the culture but not of it. My grandparents immigrated to the US from Lebanon at the beginning of the 20th century and I grew up watching cartoons, reading comic books and drawing in my sketchpad, dreaming. When I was a kid my father called me into his workshop in the garage and showed me an old National Geographic pictorial of Beirut from before it was broken into a million pieces. We stood there flipping through it and he said, “This is what it looked like…it was beautiful” A few years later my dad was dead and like Beirut he was only alive for me in pictures. In the world of pictures, nothing ever goes all the way away. But it does. And we are between the two, staying and going, always. We are lousy with ghosts.

I grew up to be an artist to try and make sense of this.

The tension between austere formality and the vulgar energy of American pop idioms characterizes the work I make in different media. Whether that is a result of the hybrid element of my identity I could not say, which I suppose is the unique condition of second generation Americans. But in my work I tend to explore related themes of particular significance to Arabs in post 9/11 America: shame and exposure, surveillance, authority, and voyeurism.

When I made these images I couldn’t sleep. Insomnia turns the familiar world strange, surreal. Night after night I sat up watching television, not asleep or entirely awake. Eventually I picked up my camera and began to photograph the flickering TV screen, one image-making machine facing another. The resulting pictures are hyper-real flashes of data and noise. I love the pixelated texture and painterly quality of them, some saturated with color and some dreamy and pale. I shot them at random and when I was compiling them afterwards they all seemed to be about frustrated desire. And, like my thoughts when I made them, feverish.

Garrote (Sex Doll)

Untitled (Anna Nicole)

Beneath the Darkness of His Outspread Hair (Ducky)

Synth

I Killed My Husband (Mary Winkler)

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