Steps in Migration also demonstrates enduring disorientation through intricacies that materialize as spatial features. Aspects of Risan’s previous works enter his tableaux as he narrates the obstacles of starting a new life, specifically the abstract forms of art books that document the American occupation of Iraq. The round and misshapen cells that spread across the handmade pages of Uranium Civilization (2007) and Baghdad Fragmented City (2007), for example, re-emerge as floaters in several recent paintings. In Hot Country Cold Country (2014), a rust color field spotted with black and crimson blotches resembles the scorched earth in Fires of Baghdad (2004) and threatens to engulf the artist as he approaches a white tempest that blankets the opposite side of the painting. Risan’s use of such imagery reflects both the lingering after-effects of war and “the crippling sorrow of estrangement,” described by Edward Said. Viewing exile as ‘”the unhealable rift forced between human being and place,” Said also argued that, “habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.”[2]