Incorrectly Perceived as Being Empty / Use Your Illusion III

Incorrectly Perceived as Being Empty
Saint John Arts Centre, New Brunswick
February 19–March 27, 2026

“Incorrectly Perceived as Being Empty marks the midpoint of Karakostas’s ten-year photographic archive of New Brunswick by car. The exhibition brings together 100 photographs from the most recent legs of an ongoing road trip through the province’s back roads, looking less for landmarks than for the things usually passed over: roadside details, peripheral moments, and places that feel strangely familiar for reasons that are difficult to explain.

The work is driven in part by the persistent déjà vu Karakostas experiences while driving, and by an attempt to rebuild an internal map of childhood through the landscape of the present. The larger project is intended to become an open archive of thousands of images, freely available for future reference, research, and use, culminating in a major survey in 2030.”

Use Your Illusion III was an artist talk at the Saint John Arts Centre about 20+ years of changing influences, bad ideas, obsessions, working methods, and occasional delusions. I jump from Tristan Tzara, Helmut Newton, Guy Debord, William Christenberry, Chris Marker, screamo, surveillance, plagiarism, fashion photography, and repeatedly deciding that whatever I had just made was no longer what I wanted to be doing.

Mostly, though, it was about trying to remember something that always feels like it’s sitting just on the tip of my tongue. Part lecture, part confession, part blame assignment: me trying to explain why I am the way I am, how I got here, and who or what might be responsible.

Here’s an hour and a half condensed down to 30 seconds.