“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.”'

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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. A woman’s tenuous figure is displaced and dissolved in and by the primordial image-ground that has formed it, framed in one 4:3 screen in black-and-white, then framed wider still on another 16:9 screen with her partner, shifting to color then back again. A third and still wider 2.39:1 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 audio, a collaborative effort between myself and artist Madison Brookshire, is a largely non-diegetic ambient soundscape, interspersed with narrative audio interview snippets from the subject/figure, Jude, and queries and stories from an unseen member of the Baháʼí faith, almost as a call-and-response.

The Valley of Search is the first work in a series of seven—The Valley of Search, 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. Each of the seven projects, in keeping with the Baháʼí Faith and the Sufi texts, “The Seven Valleys and the Four Valleys” and “The Conference of the Birds”, is a stage in a strenuous process of spiritual attainment on the path toward union with the Divine.

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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.