The Side Show

“We're not mere spectators, or a cosmic accident, or some sideshow, or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience IS the main event.”
Terence McKenna

The Sideshow is the unique new series from The International Collaboration Project duo Deb Young and Francisco Diaz, designed to usher the viewer to a fictitious seaside carnival. Here, the notion of the sideshow is a metaphor for the human condition. We view ourselves bathed in the amusement park experience - consumption, excitation, fun and desire are the driving motivations - as storm clouds threaten on the horizon.

The Sideshow series places the viewer squarely in the action and offers the photographic form some new ideas. Experimenting with flashback and flash forward, Diaz and Young prompt further engagement with the viewer. This technique of depicting flashback and flashforward posits that each image in these groupings can work as a separate entity or chunk that can be shifted to create different interpretations. Because of this independent modularity, time, in The Sideshow, is shown to be flexible, not simply sequential - much like memory recall of an exciting experience.

Diaz and Young’s The Sideshow series suggests that “... what we call reality is in fact nothing more than a culturally sanctioned and linguistically reinforced hallucination.”
Terence McKenna