Smoke & Mirrors: A Life Project

Nearly a decade ago, I was a workaholic Angeleno with an Obama-era baby in the back seat of my car. Then, in an instant, a smartphone notification shattered my reality. Waves of panic, fear, and shock crashed over me. To ground myself, I spoke aloud:

"My life is not what I thought it was. Things are not as they appear to be."

I dialed the police, doctors, therapists, my mother, then, amidst the chaos, I wrote a note to myself:

Curate a show called Smoke & Mirrors.

Reality hijacked magical thinking. Emails and images collapsed the carefully crafted illusions I had mistaken for truth. That moment remains seared into my memory, a hyper-visual rupture, a Chris Marker-esque montage where memories dissolved into myths.

It was a flash, a blink that felt photographic, a manic PowerPoint of falsity. Instinctively, I reached for Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida:

"The punctum of a photograph is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)."

What are the effects of illusion, the signs of delusion, the functions of perception?

Magic is crucial. And out of this rupture, a phantasmagoric new life emerged.

Revisiting that original Post-it note, it now feels almost burlesque, a reflection of our social media society, post-truth culture, fake news era. The travesty of the magic lantern echoes through a world where personal disillusionment pales in comparison to political deception.

The surreal has given way to the hyperreal, the supereal, the inexplicably unreal.

Smoke & Mirrors is not just an exhibition. It is a psycho-social journey. A life project.