If our vision has failed, what does it mean that we have created meaning from the things we have seen over time?

An audience is situated in a semi-circle around a desk with a slide projector pointed toward a stage with a triangular screen. The piece consists of images accompanied by text that I narrate quietly through a megaphone in a three-part proof and disproof.

I explain, “It looks like the city, but I can tell you that most everyone in this picture is dead.”

My argument, built out of poetic suggestion fitted against obscure images, suggests that our apparatus of seeing is inherently flawed. Its trajectory is toward blindness.

“Then there is the threat of whiteness and white’s ability to tear apart the seen, as it has been doing since the beginning of eyes and circles and white spheres.

“A vision that can’t tell what it views: fixed on the whiteness of the creature at the bottom of the frame, but no longer able to tell from which end the head will come. An important distinction to make, when the tail is soft, and the head has teeth that tear and bite, tearing just as viciously as the white.

“Or a privileged loss of vision, where things become unrecognizable, and the grave of a beloved friend turns back into just rocks and lilies, and the pain is, in a way, forgotten. In blindness perhaps there is less loss.”

It becomes clear that we are living on one point of this trajectory and that everything is getting more and more red. One image begets another image begets another, untill there is a teetering stack of images.

I present images about time, beauty, history, artifice and ancestry that demonstrate more explicitly how untrustworthy, insubstantial, or even capricious our visual experience may be.