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Chinonso Ani @Myloved $3.87   

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The images form a haunting, surreal series that reimagines the Ten Commandments as stone tablets scattered across a desolate, sun-scorched canyon. Each photograph replaces the austere, singular moment of Sinai with a fractured, almost post-apocalyptic landscape where the divine word has been shattered, multiplied, and left to weather among the rocks. The tablets are no longer two neat slabs carried down by Moses; they are dozens of heavy, weathered monoliths, some upright, some leaning, some toppled and half-buried in sand. Their surfaces are carved not only in ancient Hebrew but in a dizzying array of scripts—Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, runic, and invented glyphs—creating the impression that the Law was proclaimed in every tongue at once and then abandoned to the erosion of time. In the first frame, two tablets stand close together like weary sentinels. The left bears a mangled English inscription that begins “110” and dissolves into pseudo-Latin and mock-Arabic flourishes: “SEIVS HOLY PEI HORDIC 913 CHAMPION.” The right tablet is even more baroque, mixing “THO DERAN HA SERIPJIVS” with “OHILY IZEN BEKS” and a date, “1911,” as if the commandments were reissued in the early twentieth century and immediately forgotten. The script is deliberately unreadable in places, letters warped and fused, suggesting that the moment the words were set in stone they began to decay. The canyon walls rise behind them, ribbed and waterless, baked into the color of old bone. A thin blade of sunlight slices between the rocks, catching the dust motes that drift like ash. The second image widens the scene to reveal four tablets arranged in a loose semicircle, as though a council of stones had convened and then fallen silent. One is titled “SCRIPTURES” in block capitals, followed by a paragraph of dense, pseudo-biblical gibberish: “slay he rolbt thole inferech side alh angel sitange aligreak.” Another, labeled “BIRTE EACUBES,” offers a mock genealogy that ends with the ominous line “The lefte thee diacitel shet. Hyotesth heer fly. Nate, flyoten harez, AO fauelh ZOI fles. Hir.” The text is not meant to be deciphered; it is meant to feel like scripture overheard in a dream—familiar cadences, alien vocabulary. The tablets cast long, knife-sharp shadows across the sand, and far in the distance a tiny balustrade is visible high on the cliff, hinting that some forgotten civilization once watched from above. The third photograph pulls back farther still, showing a narrow ravine choked with tablets. Sunlight pours straight down the slot like molten gold, illuminating perhaps a dozen stones in various states of collapse. One tablet, half-sunk, is titled “HONY SITI IACHET” and speaks in a parody of King James English: “surah Iuga embrasuri luor a Rohit shagon of the station Haines.” Another, standing proud, bears the heading “THE BONS TOMS” and a list that begins “1. Blessed are they that mourned hant-jenette.” The sheer number of tablets creates a sense of overload, as if the Law multiplied beyond human capacity to receive it. The canyon walls close in, their strata recording eons of indifference to the words below. The fourth image is the most theatrical: five tablets form a rough cross, each arm ending in a stone slab. At the center intersection lies a small wooden cross, no larger than a hand, half-buried in sand—an intrusion of Christian symbolism into the older Jewish archetype. The tablets themselves are carved with ornate borders and faux-medieval lettering. One declares “WITH LEACH beres ALLEN The RUASO HUNES” and descends into a spiral of nonsense: “Lassocke lasi Alway Hunes.” Another, titled “AOTH YOM,” mixes mock-Latin and fractured English: “Loquitur paul roges in lyenco! In ten Litteri or roges.” The sunlight strikes the cross and flares, turning the entire tableau into a stark silhouette against the glowing sky. The fifth frame abandons upright tablets altogether. The stones lie scattered like the pages of a torn book, some face-down, some cracked in half. The largest, center-frame, is open like a codex, its two inner faces carved with continuous text that flows from one slab to the other. The script is a hybrid of Hebrew and an invented angular alphabet, dense and unbroken, as if the entire Torah had been compressed into a single breathless sentence. Around it, smaller fragments bear isolated phrases: “In puja tray althoi l cui,” “of gajil snaked arn lhou.” The canyon has widened here, and the light is softer, almost mournful, catching on the dust that clings to every crevice. The sixth image returns to three tablets, but now they are unmistakably modern in their absurdity. The left is titled “THE BAITTERS” and opens with a list that mimics the Decalogue: “1. Thou shalt not covt thy neyghbours oxe.” The center tablet, “ELONTYSP TASTRER,” is carved in faux-Arabic that dissolves into English: “And lo, he who tasteth the bitter root shall know the sweetness of the fig.” The right, “HOY GIARES,” offers a pseudo-Arabic heading followed by the single legible line “earth to earth, dust to dust.” The tablets are smaller than the others, almost portable, as if someone had tried to carry the Law away and given up halfway. The final photograph is the most austere. Three tablets stand in a perfect line, facing the viewer like an accusing tribunal. The left is titled “Holy Situres” and numbered like the original commandments, but the text is pure parody: “1. Net together the cochineal… 10. Theaxith oo ctall gosies.” The center tablet, smaller and tilted, bears a single paragraph of dense, unreadable script. The right tablet, “Fish blasted goeth ther hants horliate swicheld,” ends with the stark declaration “This elem of erticlee shall ecto silcosa lecticae.” Behind them, the canyon walls converge into a V that points toward a sliver of blinding sky. The sunlight has shifted to late afternoon; long shadows stretch across the sand, and the tablets seem to lean forward, as though the weight of their own illegibility is finally pulling them down. Taken together, the series is a meditation on the fragility and futility of revelation. The canyon is both Sinai and its antithesis—a place where the word of God was once thundered forth, now reduced to a graveyard of unreadable stones. The multiplicity of scripts suggests a universal proclamation that no one can quite grasp; the erosion and breakage imply that even stone cannot preserve meaning forever. Yet the persistent sunlight, the careful arrangement of the tablets, and the sheer labor implied in their carving all speak of an enduring human impulse to inscribe, to remember, to reach toward something eternal even as the desert reclaims every letter.

Chinonso Ani @Myloved $3.87   

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