“And when he drinks this drop both worlds are gone...” - Farid Attar, The Conference of the Birds

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A soul/Self must cleanse her heart and, paradoxically, shed faith in crossing this first valley. Her recollections, her stories and her form, are slivers at the cusp of certitude. She wavers. This slow crossing, this trek, in fits, half-seen steps and glimpsed landscapes, is situated within, and at times against, the broad lines of revelation put forward in Baháʼí and Sufi literature. It is a process—contemplative, visceral, and elastic—that deepens in time, and “the steed of this Valley is patience.”' (1)

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The Valley of Search is an architectural multichannel media installation that charts a figure/soul/Self's cryptic journey through interior and exterior landscapes toward what might be termed willful surrender, or perhaps an intentional, pre-mediated state of receptivity. It is the first work in a series, “Seven Valleys”, each, in keeping with Baháʼí Faith and the Sufi texts, a stage in a strenuous process of spiritual attainment on the path toward union with the Divine.

In this piece the tenuous figure of a woman, Jude, is displaced and dissolved in and by a nebulous, primordial image-ground—of foliage, of streams, crowds and streets—again and again, intimately framed on a 4:3 screen in black-and-white. She's framed wider still on another 16:9 screen with her partner, again visually dissolved and displaced, shifting to color then back again. Their figures waver on the threshold of resolve, like the audible slivers of her stories that punctuate the installation space. The ambient, mostly non-diegetic audio—a collaborative effort between myself and artist Madison Brookshire—undulates between providing a concrete grounding for the semi-abstract, painterly footage, and moments of sustained tense repose on the edge of dissolution.

A third and still wider 2.35:1 screen shows seven static 4-minute landscape/cityscape shots of valleys, some rural, some pastoral, some sprawling with overpasses and close-pressed neighborhoods, skyscrapers. These shots alternate between black-and-white and color from one shot to the next.

The three looped video channels are each experienced singly and successively broaden out. They are associatively linked by the soundscape which is divided into two broad asynchronous zones: one within the space of the 4:3 screen/channel, and a second within the space between the other two wider screens. This is interspersed with narrative audio interview snippets from Jude, and disembodied queries and stories from an interview with an unseen member of the Baháʼí faith, almost as a call-and-response. The vocal snippets punctuate the space at loosely set intervals and present the possibility of micro-narrative, thematic, or poetic synchronicity or dissonance between sound and image. Interpretation and experience thus fluctuates widely even as the audience sinks into a sound-sculpted emotive baseline, a state of meditative reflection. For 'the steed of this Valley is Patience'; and the aim is that, given enough time in this Valley, an open state of receptive expectation becomes, if only momentarily, an end unto itself, extended outward in faith.

The Valley of Search is to be succeeded by six others: The Valley of Love, The Valley of Knowledge, The Valley of Unity, The Valley of Contentment, The Valley of Wonderment, and the Valley of True Poverty and Absolute Nothingness.

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In the telling at the edge of surrender, again, there is an attempt to cleanse the heart, yet 'The steed of this Valley is patience.’