This exhibition brings together imagery drawn from Islamic miniature painting and Ebru, the Anatolian art of paper marbling, to generate new configurations of land and air. Motifs of earth, wind, and cloud are lifted from their original positions in the backgrounds of historic miniature paintings—often scenes of battle, conquest, and grand myth—and reassembled into imagined landscapes. Rock formations that once served as witnesses to larger narratives become active agents for building new worlds.

Translated through screen printing, a process that both preserves and unsettles their established forms, these elements are reoriented and reconfigured. Printed landforms hover in indeterminate space and time, their surfaces facing upward and downward simultaneously. Defying gravity and a single horizon, they position the viewer at shifting angles and orientations.

In reorienting these elements for the present—outside the narratives of conflict and power through which they are often encountered—the works gesture toward the possibility of worlds beyond such grand mythologies. This oblique positioning resonates with Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology, in which queerness is understood as a deviation from normative orientations: a “becoming oblique” in relation to the world. Here, land itself is queered—angled, suspended, and loosened from inherited ways of seeing and inhabiting space.

What You Seek Is Seeking You invites viewers to consider how land and wind have been represented across traditions, and how these elemental forces are encountered as living, relational presences—seeking us as we seek them.

The artist gratefully acknowledges the support of the Chalmers Family Fund administered by the Ontario Arts Council.