"The Revelers"
Narrative disruption calls upon a remarkable and mysterious capacity in the evolved human mind, which is the ability, figuratively speaking, to be present simultaneously in two places at the same moment or, more correctly stated, to experience two or more inconsistent visual realities at the same time without confusion and alarm. When you first take in this image, your mind probably begins by suspending its disbelief to enter the mural's cartoon story of German village revelers, only to be jarred out of that reality and pulled into another frame when you spot the mother and daughter descending the stairs or the child pouting at the bottom.
For the child, as for the viewer, the action within the carnival mural is both happening and not happening, much in the way that you can watch an old news clip of Adolf Hitler shrieking at his troops and feel for a few seconds that you are actually there while, at the same instant, you realize you are not there, that Hitler and all those troops are now in fact dead and gone, and that this event isn't actually happening, it is merely a ghost on your television screen.
My mind finds something enchanting and fresh about this image with its co-existent and rivaling narratives. Alienated beauty engages the mind at the flickering boundary between unaligned realities.
TITLE - "The Revelers"
WHERE - Traveling carnival, Coquitlam, B.C. (2017)