CONFUSATIONS

"Reality is not what it is. It consists of the many realities which it can be made into."
                                                                  -Wallace Stevens

Seven years ago, I arrived to this city after 23 years in the desert. Although one can easily become disoriented in a desert, Walter Benjamin, who was an urban dweller to the holes in his shoes, wrote that it is difficult to get lost in a city. But there are so many ways to get lost! North felt like I was facing South, East seemed to be where West should be.

Recently, after photographing the amazing forest that grows in midst of this city, I began to walk the streets, which naturally brought me to looking at windows, surfaces seen through even while reflecting the world around them, a bricolage of substance and illusion. Unlike mirrors, they are not portals, or occasions for narcissism, but present possibilities for reorganizing one's seeing into various dimensions and depths.

After photographing one reflection, I showed it to a friend, who found it “confusing.” Thus, I decided to gather photographs as “Confusations”—a neologism I parsed into: “confiscation” (“taking a picture”), “sensation,” (as in Debord’s spectacle), and “fuse” (how the brain fuses memories to mediate a world). A picture within a picture, they ‘sat down’ and, however briefly they stayed, they became part of the place for ever. In Yolngu terms, they turned into the place. Whatever events happened at the place, whatever sequence they occurred in, whatever intervals existed between them, all becomes subordinate to their representation in space as a world within itself. [image is link]

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Joel Weishaus
Summer 2007