Kaleb M. Starr: Endless Rooms
/The deep hallways of the inner mind and the human Subconscious are a miraculous, endlessly intriguing, and for some, a terrifying place to explore. All of our life experiences, our memories, our beliefs, our skills, the many situations we've endured along with every single image we've ever seen are filed away and stored in endless rooms that stretch toward infinity. Certain bits of our personal collected data are shuffled off as puzzle pieces into far and dark corners until they become nothing more than a forgotten remembrance of a half-formed notion. They become lost among the piles of other discarded thoughts, concepts, and sentiments, sometimes by design, and sometimes by choice. These lost pieces of puzzle will often find themselves a separate connecting piece, triggering a certain form of memory retrieval and sometimes even such phenomena as Deja vu, an unsettling wave of overwhelming familiarity when it shouldn't quite be there at all.
Early in life, I began to experience random moments of memory recall, oftentimes explainable, but sometimes not. My parents would constantly point out and bwear witness to my overly active imagination, so when I would bring up or talk about certain events I suddenly remembered experiencing, it was quickly disregarded as play. It wasn't until merit, and in some cases, I discovered I was indeed right and that my experience wasn't solely a subconscious one. This soon led to a personal journey of self-discovery and a re-education on certain events from my past. Still to this day and fairly regularly, I experience these odd moments where I question if I'm indeed recalling a lost piece of my personal puzzle of just a simple fleeting wave of Deja vu, which still widely considered a mystery, some researchers speculate as quickly passing malfunctioning between the long and short-term circuits in the brain. While this theory may just be accurate and incessantly fascinating. I believe we truly do hold the very answers we seek as conscious and ever-questioning individuals.
This series of photographs is a brief but personal walk through an endless room of discarded puzzle pieces, people and places that connect and form into something bigger, whether clear or still mostly abstract. These images are my attempt at curating random memories that find their way to the surface through one way or another, still only on the cusp of a fleeting dream rather than reality. Using expired black and white film on a variety of 35mm cameras, plastic toy cameras, instant cameras, broken light seals, alternative methods of developing, and altering actual negatives. As a result, the photographs I’ve created were born from a mix of direct focus, simple chance, unforeseen circumstance, and the deliberate avoidance of right.
