I was shot the minute I was born. I did not feel this wound till years later when sitting on a couch with my mother. She slipped a photo from a plastic sleeve, hoping to protect the memory before memory itself fails. It was her, it was me, together, laying on a bed, both wrapped in white. Holding myself, I realized I was once smaller, someone different, a baby instead of a child. I did not grasp my past within my hands, but something closer to that present, a paper in hand that caught light differently. It was better to put back the photo in plastic before my hands could smudge it, my mother told me.
Delirium is not an illness within itself; rather, it expresses as an acute consequence of an alteration to the conscious. Disrupting attention and emotional reasoning, nearly all individuals will experience delirium in their lives. Seeing multiples, or hallucinating, is a common consequence.
I saw myself as a double, both there and a different there. Remembering it now, I may be considered a triple.
Let us consider a case outside my memory, outside my unreliable narration. An example where an individual experiences multiplicity through material.
Three visions emerged when John Lake, George Perez, and Mark Sink collaborated for an exhibition, an act similar to looking at a finger too close to your face and seeing its ghostly double. The consequent exhibition Delirium serves as a scattering of these visions. Employing practices by artists working through photography, not only the curatorial intention but the medium itself begin to separate like pages in a photo album.
Why choose delirium? Well, affect or, to put it in simpler terms, emotional response.
That is to say: we view art to confuse our sense of reality. Sometimes it is a voluntary delusion, others times involuntary.
Nothing Ever Seems to Work Out for Me, Eileen Roscina, 16mm Film
8. These moments of voluntary delusion are not hidden from us; rather, we accept that another moment captures the light of the familiar present but then confuses the events of both. Eileen Roscina’s film conjures back memories of childhood parties, the faint red glow burning images of cake and paper hats onto the subconscious. A staccato pacing of each still plays like a family film that one expects annually, each one different yet reassuringly the same. The film familiarizes itself with a kind past where birthdays were a central celebration of childhood. This nostalgia, however, also confuses as it brings to the surface an absurdity where blowing out candles, or setting them ablaze, required documentation and celebration.
9.I’ll confess to learning when confusion sits upon your tongue it leads to indistinguishable frustrations. Left for long enough though, confusion melts into the familiar then into sweetness.
10.Conversely, an involuntary delusion wounds sensibilities. The photograph ceases to be a border between subject and viewer, but the two collide. The two puncture each own’s reality with a force of painful recognition. A photo installation of poverty in Upstate New York instigates this puncturing, a brick and mortar pasting of photos supporting loose bodies and cluttered spaces. A photojournalist project of Brenda Ann Kenneally, Upstate Girls surrounds you with faces you have never seen, but the frail bodies and absent eyes seem eerily familiar. A woman’s voice creeps into unsuspecting ears like rain seeping under a windowsill; the voice does not sit, but walks into a response that recognizes a regional suffering. This community seems present in the space, embracing the viewer into recognizing an alterity of experience beyond the gallery walls.
11.Photos surround me in the hallway towards my grandmother’s bedroom, resting upon walls and glassed in cabinets. The space vibrates with sameness: the same furniture, the same photos, the same fading paint, different carpet though. It was once brown. It is still brown, but a softer brown. Faces of family members, most I never knew, circle my body (my memory), trying to cut their way into some sense of familiarity. The only thing I recognize, I believe with no proof, is that they were once alive, objects of their personality caught in film, then paper, then words. I should empathy for lives lived, but they’re only objects of passed memory too close to my own.
Upstate Girls, Brenda Ann Keneally, Photo and Video Installation
12.Yellow does not envelope my memory; I think it would be steeped in blue like indigo leaves giving up their green. This may or may not be romantic, more likely a cliche.
13.Photos wrap around memory with such ease. Some you may choose. Many more are chosen by someone else for you to stumble upon. In its mass circulation, some photographs craft a memory that seems almost personal, yet not experienced; many people will be familiar with that image, all claiming that it is their own: a prosthetic memory. These memories are not blue, but as Marja Saleva suggests, they may be yellow. A series of blinded faces, washed out by white, laugh, contemplate, or focus on obscured objects. Floating bits of color mark these photographic spaces as surreal encounters, replicating memories of both quiet kitchens and gregarious parties. Where these photos fail is in their appeal to the personal. They do not mark specific memories; rather, they cling around memories like an extension of the things we already remember. They are universal, in that respect, both an isolated experience and an encompassing event.
Marja Saleva, Inkjet Prints
14.As I write this, my instagram floats besides me. Pictures rise across my screen as I pass my finger upwards towards nothing. A habitual response for every other word I type on a separate screen.
15.I should interject that I fully realize that I am addicted to my phone and to other people’s photos. I don’t post myself, not that often at least. I’m afraid my perspective may not be enough.
16.I also realize that I might be delusional.
Still from Dune Bugs, Sam Cannon, GIF on Monitor
17.Legs can repeat past two. They can come in fours or eights, or they can pop up from a bed or sand, flinching in the same pattern indefinitely. Playing a fracturing moment, Sam Cannon brings an unsettling similarity to the repetitive photo content found on our phones through the GIF format. Establishing a commentary on the disparity of gender displayed within digital spaces, these digital works showcase the repetitive content that we claim as unique within digital communication. A repetitive flick of a leg, or the unsettling bobbing of breasts in milk, projects a sense of individual moments differentiated by time, yet they are the same legs, the same breasts, the same subject. They are part of the same infuriating procession of similar content that populates our social spaces, each one prodding for attention.
18.An example: ten friends will post ten different sunsets, all beautiful and all orange. In the end, they are all the same— a picture of a sunset. Ultimately slipping into forgetfulness, they join a grid of sunsets archived thousands of times each evening, all beautiful and all orange.
19.Dementia is startlingly similar to delirium. Both affect cognition. Both affect attention. Both affect recall, yet the later does not fade away. Often, dementia traps delirium within its progress smothering it in a heavy blanket of confusion, with memories eventually choked out. It is an illness, not caught, but slowly embraced.
20.Is it with us always? I do not know, but if it is, I will choose to forget its companionship.
21.My great-grandfather on his death bed, forgetting close to everything, kept two things by him: a bible and a picture of his wife (deceased eight years.)
22.In the process of forgetting, memories cease to be “like a movie.” They become more distilled, momentary, as brief as a photo.
23.The brief moments found in Sherry Wiggin’s and Luis Felipe Branco’s collaboration exemplifies this flash of memory. In these constructed scenes, the female figure central in these works appears strained, the neck contorted either forward or backward by the weight of fabric. When entering the exhibition, the red in Red Canyon shines brilliant and as shocking as blood. It is close to impossible not to recognize this pose, a face hidden by agony. These images suggest a pointed pain, an instant moment of unbearable experience. Is this pain chronic? I think not; memory can only distill such terrible things to one moment. Any longer and the pain would bring a blinding delirium.
Red Canyon, Sherry Wiggin and Luis Felipe Branco, Inkjet Prints in Frames
24. What is left to say? These photos, brought together by three overlapping visions, exemplify the delirious state of photography in our contemporary moment. The material no longer sits in simplicity but within a confused form that crosses a series of processes and technologies. The subjects of photography scatter into the natural and the manipulated both into foreignness and familiarity. Affect remains the unifying element across the fracturing state of photography. Delirium offers a survey of some of these affects that change our conscious to be more receptive of a reproduced world found in images. Accepting that these moments craft empathy, these photos bring one closer to a different time, a different memory, consequently disorienting our own perspective. Ultimately, they leave one with a new memory of a moment where content relaxed and affect pierced away the delusion of two separate experiences, recognizing a shared humanity.
25. I keep a photo in my wallet of myself and a few friends. A kept affect, the small polaroid of a memory developing as rapidly as it disappeared. It is kind. It is familiar. I was a different person then, but it is no longer a confusion. I am happy holding it, remembering them together. It is the closest thing to grasping a wound; one that I leave to bleed.
