STARRED TOGETHER

A constellation of darkness
another of light

A gesture to be completed
by light

(Cecilia Vicuña, "Cruz del Sur")

A glance hits an object or person and pins it down like a star. The actual moves. Selective memory drama is what you experience, or is it what you see on the screen? While sitting in the box, images from a window are stolen from the street. The homes of the homeless become a story. The narrative drive is what clings to the actual moves; the narrative drive persists through the fragmentation in which seeing occurs. Juxtaposition in film is familiar. Even in soap operas. Piecing together the parts, the desolation alongside ("b/side") the pastoral garden. The washing of a pretty foot in the water of a hydrant. A beautiful woman resting in a garden in a white lace "shift." The blue tarps spread over the makeshift houses. You have a bird's eye view. Shifting from one response to another. Laughter in the garden makes itself so. Without a home, inspired (defeated?) by what has disappeared completely. Trying to avoid that which you'd like to disappear, and yet, no matter how you focus your lens, it strikes you again and again. Shift away for the view, and your self is drawn in on rip tide. The sound of the bulldozers as they sweep the yard clean. The waves of debris float forward to the edge of the earth. You look through the trees into the garden to see a space that is unified. The perversion of your own observation as it crawls towards summary.

The position of the stars determines your character. Stolen from a window on Wall Street, the bathroom of a bordello. Slit down the middle vertically. All the bodies and narratives divided into a split screen. We peer and see money, clothing, skin. Substances exchange. You think it's from your childhood, but see it later on video as happening long before your childhood. At the bottom of the window, facing away from you, is a mirror – thus each of the room's occupants face the mirror and in turn (unknowingly) face you. Seeing what's not supposed to be seen. Seeing others see themselves. "Voyeur? – C'est Moi!" More so than when you sat in the box and a woman whom you have been following (as in narrative) stares back at you. But the circumstance of looking has fewer ramifications – can realizing the corruption of your own detached look, in response to this place, cause anything to happen? Can realizing the corruption of your own detached look-in the face of the other place, in walking down the street without seeing – cause anything to happen? You see yourself looking and trust that it is enough.

A systematic assemblage: the Pleiades. The means by which people who have nothing, make something of it. You follow one particular shack and watch it transform from owner to owner. Architecture and interior design as representative of an identity and position. First there is a roof. Then there is a door. Then there is a fake address, because numbers mean nothing here against a stone building in Chinatown. You are no longer looking at yourself looking. Instead, inspecting what someone has made in the face of a city's refusal. The object of your gaze is no longer a figure that you follow (as in narrative). The objects become subjects in the fact of their creations, and so resist your self – reflection. They show you their houses and the procedures of their being there at all communicate the occupants, not you. Can looking save? When you look at a constellation, you draw the points together with your own lines. But when someone catches your eye in a direct grip, there are no more stars. You might shake your hands at the sky as the light crashes in, we're pinning you down. You might shake your head to clear it, then step inside.