24 Frames

24 Frames is an enterable labyrinth of twenty-four salvaged doors arranged in two concentric squares. Some doors stand open, inviting passage; some remain closed. And some only appear to be open: the slab swings wide on its hinges, but the frame it reveals is sealed with mirror. The doorway that seems to lead elsewhere leads only to the visitors themselves.

In these frames, the mirror reflects the door’s own open slab — one door becomes two, the real and its double hinged to the same frame. Everything about the threshold says pass through: the open slab, the depth in the mirror, the light of the room continuing beyond. Only the body discovers the truth. What is passable and what is reflection cannot be known from a distance — it can only be tested by walking, by reaching out, by moving through. Here truth is not given to the eye; it unfolds gradually, verified step by step, shaped by expectation and belief until the moment the hand meets the mirror.

The title borrows from cinema’s most precise measurement of time: twenty-four frames per second, the rate at which still images fuse into motion, into life. Yet what the measurement captures is exactly what escapes it. We experience our lives as continuous flow, when in truth we move through discrete instants, discrete choices, discrete doors — and no counting of frames accounts for how a second feels: how it stretches at a threshold, how it quickens as we age. Each frame in this installation is one such instant — a second of a life, held open, closed, or only seeming open. Walking the labyrinth, visitors do what consciousness does invisibly all the time: they assemble duration out of fragments, movement out of stillness, a path out of twenty-four separate thresholds.

For years my practice has dwelled in liminal space — portals, doorways, stairs, and mirrors placed in deserts, on shorelines, in salt flats — thresholds that promise elsewhere while returning the viewer’s own image. 24 Frames gathers that inquiry into architecture: a field of thresholds to be lost inside. In the Persian mystical tradition that grounds my work, the door and the mirror share one teaching — that the journey outward is always a journey inward, and that what we search for behind every door is immeasurable precisely because it is ourselves.