(Visions)
BVJ Faubion
Found 07/2010, Savers

In the end, our interior lives are ultimately unreal, the interactions of external stimuli with memories that may, themselves, be fictions. The subject of BVJ Faubion’s Untitled (Visions) is a vortex of disturbed whorls, the image of an old man for a moment emerging from the roiling liquid of photomanipulated chaos. Images float before him—animals, faces, disturbing visages. His haunted expression suggests that these are his fading memories, but in Faubion’s hyperimpressionistic reality, how reliable is this impression? If the image of an old man is itself unreal and distorted, are his memories—seemingly clearer and more reliable than the figure recalling them—any more or less real?

Visions suggests that our perceptions, our existence, are ultimately illusory. Memory, life, are merely transitional states, images pulled out of clouds or seen in swirls of oil on water. While that is particularly true when memory starts to fade at the end of life, our lives are, ultimately, brief bubbles on the surface of a moving river.