Phantasmagoria: The Fictitious Truth of 1666 Bruce Street

Phantasmagoria: The Fictitious Truth of 1666 Bruce Avenue presents a visual metaphor of fiction and truth within records. Digital extrapolations, presented through unconventional media with accompanying narration, make an intimate statement about the surreal concept of a shared reality.

Human experience, once recorded, begins its own swirling existence through time and interpretation, dissolving and reconstituting until the original truth becomes a fiction of the past and the fictional past becomes a truth of the moment. Perspectives turn on time and place, revealing only what falls within a limited sightline at a particular moment. Tina Gutierrez decomposes the photographic record found at 1666 Bruce Avenue (the former home of an early 20th-century mortician and his family) into digital renditions presented through unexpected media that challenges the two-dimensional confines of conventional photography, while Larry Brown resurrects a narrative about the inhabitants of that recorded world.

The exhibition disrupts norms of photographic presentation, linear time translation of photographic content, and acceptance of photography’s posited reality. Using found family photos, the exhibition complicates our understanding of recorded lives by extrapolating past documentation into new views from our present portal. Brown and Gutierrez’s creative process is dependent upon what was left behind, while visual processing is dependent upon what is put forth: the result is a phantasmagoria of images and words.