“In the Valley of Shin’ar…” started with a series of photographs I took of a burned out building in Pennsylvania. The spaces where the sky appeared through burned out rafters grew into a language of repetitive shapes that allude to the cycle of ruin and possibility. I also think of these shapes as units of language and the structures they create as fleeting moments of communication. Our current usage of “babel” tends to refer to nonsense or a breakdown in communication; though the old story goes that in the valley of Shin’ar, after the devastation of the flood, all the people of the worldspoke the same language. I think much of the world still longs for this impossible ideal of a common endeavor.