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"Chintz" - Anna Chupa

"My tiling designs are inspired by Islamic architecture. I extract photographs of plant details, mostly floral, from their backgrounds, montage them into still life compositions and embed them into tiles called girih.
 The word girih literally translates to “knot” in Arabic, and was first used by Peter J. Lu to describe a set of five tiles: a regular decagon, a regular pentagon, a concave hexagon (bowtie), an elongated hexagon, and a rhombus decorated with zigzagging lines called strapwork. The central portion of this design utilizes a two-level design using subdivision and substitution. The pattern that appears at a smaller scale is revisited at a larger scale. Then the flowers used within the pattern are echoed on the borders in an enlarged scale.
     At close viewing distances, the floral forms in the center are visible and distinct, but these dissolve into the broader context of geometric pattern at more typical viewing distances, consistent with the aesthetic of dematerialization in Islamic architecture."