In 1987 Peter Fischli & David Weiss created the 30-minute film “The Way Things Go”. Like a game of dominoes, the film captures a series of cause and effect actions carried out by juxtapositions of ordinary objects, fire and water to animate the laws of nature. Without a human presence, the seemingly mechanized events in this film transcend the ordinary principles of chemistry and gravity to appear supernatural.

Our magical link to the physical universe is an essential source of inspiration and exploration for video artists. Capturing the mysterious ways we are connected to being here (or rendering the familiar as mysterious) seems to make us feel better about the unexplainable we find in daily life. The medium’s increased accessibility and portability has allowed the video camera to become an everyday accessory, a tool that is ready to capture snapshots of daily life, document performances, interventions, and spontaneous interviews in the public domain. The artists in the exhibition explore the diverse potential of video as an artistic medium while conceptually playing with our certainty of reality. The exhibition employs Fischli & Weiss’s “The Way Things Go” as a catalyst for works that ask us to reconsider what we think we know.

• Will Rogan’s (San Francisco) video getting through (spectral vortex) elegantly elevates the commonplace to the paranormal when a child appears both awed and alarmed by her own infinite reflection in a pair of mirrored doors. Finding the echoes of her image, she uses her voice to create a meeting of her alternate selves.

• Adam Frelin’s (St. Louis) Water Rerouting Intiatives employs graffiti style tactics to re-direct the water flow from its natural course. Frelin explains, "Much of my work pertains to physical laws of nature and the points of which these laws and our constructed world intersect.”

• The New York Public Library is the backdrop for Juan Recaman's (Colombia/New York) Reading Room; a catalogue of whispered interviews in which Recaman asks, "What are you reading?" Descriptive responses range from the invention of the bayonet to the philosophy of humor, revealing that the search clarity often arrives at abstraction.

• In Speech Lesson, Julie Lequin (Los Angeles) a native French speaker, attempts to clarify a monologue about her own work through improved English enunciation. Playing double roles as both herself and the voice-overed speech coach, the conversation appears comprehensible at first but quickly falls to ambiguity and confusion.

• Kerry Tribe’s (Los Angeles) Naïve Melody pans a lush Floridian jungle as we listen to a folkloric voice that tells one version of where we might go from here.

• Siebren Versteeg’s (New York) CC challenges our faith in information, using an Internet connection to format random online diary entries into closed captions over silent video loops of talking newscasters.

-Catherine Ross