Shadowy Images

The lights have gone out at the Century Gallery in Sylmar, the better to let the art do the illuminating.

Visual art manipulates light in sundry ways. But in the group show titled “Emotion and Light,” the work emits light either by using video monitors sculpturally or by presenting bizarre display boxes that seem to bathe their odd contents in colored light.

In Marsia Alexander’s video installation, four monitors show tightly cropped close-up shots of a Chinese-American woman discussing her displaced sense of culture.

The four sources are out of sync, adding up to a dizzying swirl of testimony veering toward abstract banter.

The sum effect of the chatter is a blur of cultural and personal distinctions.

Four monitors are also deployed in “Breath of Venus,” by Stuart Bender and Angelo Funicelli, but they are stacked vertically, suggesting a figurative structure.

Dream-like, looping shots of a nude woman swimming underwater (an artist who died not long after the footage was taken), colored by abstract sound components, seem to maneuver up through the top three monitors.

Simultaneously, the lower monitor shows animated lungs in motion.

The piece reflects on mortality, the mysteries of the human organism and celebrating life as it inevitably slips away.

*

TIn Cynthia Minet’s “Suspensions,” seven plexiglass cubes have been filled with an ambiguous fluid and not-always-recognizable objects filtered through colored light.

It makes for a slightly creepy facsimile of a museum with unclear intentions.

Some might be reminded of the dank, chilled, aquarium in Morro Bay, next to the plangent seal-feeding tank.

Provoking questions is part of the artist’s intention. Here, as with the video art, the ambient darkness becomes its sense of mystery.

BE THERE

“Emotion and Light,” through Dec. 4 at the Century Gallery, 13000 Sayre St., Sylmar. Gallery hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Monday-Friday, noon-4 p.m. Saturday. (818) 362-3220.