Multiplex, the current survey of contemporary video on view at Western Bridge through March 29^th, is a romp. Focusing on the medium’s kinship with cinema, the selected works operate within the usual matrix of ideas we associate with it, but with considerably more flair than we are accustomed. While video artists such as Gary Hill and Bill Viola concern themselves with consciousness and ontology at the most essential level, these artists have chosen to explore this subject matter through the vernacular of film.

Takeshi Murata’s Monster Movie is a four minute digitally-altered clip of an actor in an unconvincing monster costume (from the dreadful Ringo Starr comedy Caveman, no less) that seeks to vividly dramatize Heraclitus’ observation, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”  The large tusked and furry creature lunges and asserts itself ferociously but degenerates just as rapidly into a sea of abstract, brightly-colored, and fast moving pixels. Propelled forward by the guttural, percussive sounds of Plate Tectonics, the piece is an engrossing examination of what constitutes our physical being. We are human, we are monstrous; we are whole, we are dissolving. Always, we move and are transformed.

The steady, uninterrupted flow of humanity itself is the subject of Dara Friedman’s documentary-like Government Cut Freestyle. At the southern tip of Miami Beach, children in slow-motion plunge into the murky industrial waterway below. While the clothes, hair, bodies, and skin color of these boys and girls vary, we slowly grow more attuned to their shared impulse to leap and the unwavering force of gravity upon their bodies the longer we watch. Identity gives way to irresistible urges and pulls, over which the individual can exert little control.

Suara Welitoff’s the song that makes you cry, a repetitious and dream-like 2-minute loop created from a piece of found film, shows a group of soldiers under fire in the theater of war. Without audio, we become disoriented watching the hazy air back-lit by fierce explosions while a soldier tries to get through to someone on his radio. Is this manipulated scene fact or fiction? What happened to these men? Was this their last moment on earth? Does this eerie quiet reflect how such cataclysmic and final moments transpire? Those of us who have only sat through Vietnam movies might think so, but how would we know? Welitoff alters a slice of reality to make art that resembles depictions of war -- depictions that must stand in for this experience in both popular entertainment and TV news. Out of necessity, we let our imaginations flesh-out situations we cannot be expected to understand.

The most cinematic work in Multiplex is Isaac Julien’s lyrical yet discordant three-channel video installation, The Long Road to Mazatlan. Two silent men - one Texan, the other Mexican – circle one another in the dry Texas landscape where their paths seem destined to culminate in the heat of passion, lust, and possibly death. Their intersecting journeys - accompanied by sporadic, intertwined yodeling and mariachi songs - are distinct yet parallel; actual and metaphorical. Their joint, overlapping, and juxtaposed scenes on the split screens make it unclear whether past events are being reflected upon or future events are being imagined. Moments of intense choreography by Javier de Frutos stand in for dialogue, suggesting mutual, conflicting desperation and resistance. The visual narrative evokes a restless state of desire; a consciousness that is probing, hopeful, and deeply wounded. While recognizable, the particulars (cattle auctions, phone booths, taverns, swimming pools, revolvers, motel rooms, gravel roads with yellow snakes and bored burlesque dancers) remain mysterious and a source of considerable fascination for the viewer. If only the movies were this good.

A comedic, minimalist counterpoint to this tragic love story, Miguel Angel Rios’ LOVE is a film of two black-and-white spinning tops that rotate around one another, colliding, separating, and returning to each other’s side as if dancing a classical pas de deux. Their movement is set to the aria from Catalani’s La Wally, a piece known to most people from the gushy 1982 film Diva. The message of that film was that art has power to transform life, and here we see the key piece of its soundtrack transforming small pieces of wood. When they inevitably fall together and cease moving, it is either the ballet dancers’ final pose or the opera singers’ foreshadowed death. LOVE has a surprising emotional undercurrent that we do not anticipate.

Jennifer Steinkamp’s Formation G, a digitally animated cascade of colorful, rippling fabrics projected on a wall, and Chrisopher Chiappa’s Toilet, a film of continuous flushing displayed on a small monitor hidden in the water closet, have less to do with cinema but compliment the other works in the exhibition nicely. The latter, with its film-like reel of toilet paper unfurling and spiraling down the loo, might be a regarded as metaphor of the medium’s demands on the artistic process.

Seattle’s Jack Daws has the exhibition’s final word with his one minute video, Bicycle Thief. It is a film of him using bolt-cutters to break a padlock on a bicycle. After committing this act, he replaces the lock with a new one he has brought with him and walks away from the scene of the crime. Daws appropriates his title from the film classic of the same name but his guerilla action suggests that there is no actual transfer of “ownership” in the act of appropriation. He has the audacity to ask whether the idea of ownership can even apply to the artist and their work. In contemporary art, as in movies, the answer appears to be no.