The Specter of Shir

In this painting, the figures, animals, and dwellings are suspended in a bright, amber-like stillness, much like a memory frozen at the moment of impact. This "paused" state is the hallmark of the canceled future. Usually, an ancestral home is a place where generations move forward, where children grow to inhabit the small orange houses and carry the culture into the next century. Here, that progression has been severed; the timeline has been cut, leaving the land to exist only in a state of "what might have been.

The two lions in the center are the most tragic figures of this stillness. In the traditional Persian context, they should be the fierce Shir, the protectors of the crown, the soil, and the divine Khvarenah. But here, their presence is paradoxical.