Visual Arts

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden

House With Pool plays out as a sort of abstract suspense film. The short-loop films in the exhibition feature elliptical narratives that invite the viewer to fantasize.

FORT WORTH – When the artistic team of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler discuss the concerns that fuel their work, they include the earliest films of George Méliès and Thomas Edison, the light in Edward Hopper's paintings, and their continuing fascination with how an image is constructed. They draw particular attention to the opaque black strip that separates the frames on a roll of film.

But don't panic and think that attending their exhibition, "No Room to Answer," at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth will be a tumble down the rabbit hole of contemporary art theory. For 15 years this international pair, now based in Austin, has been realizing these concerns in large-scale color photographs and short, dreamlike looping videos that are engaging, perplexing and produced to the highest technical standards.

Several series of photographs show the artists' interest in what happens outside the image, and what occurs before and after the image is captured. In Falling Down (1996) they present people dropping things. Projected backgrounds and costuming place the scenes in specific environments ranging from a supermarket to a bus station to a library. You never see the actors' faces, and so you read their characters from their clothing.

The falling objects have been mounted either by invisible supports or by means the artists have digitally removed, making the final photograph a perfectly frozen moment. Mild social embarrassment is the order of the day. In one image a woman has dropped her wig while running through the woods. We see only the back of the wig and so it may be that the woman's head is involved as well. This is the sort of unsettling development Ms. Hubbard and Mr. Birchler excel at creating.

Arsenal (2000) is a series of photographs shot in a soon-to-be-shuttered art cinema in Germany. The young blond woman who poses in most of the images creates a direct reference to Edward Hopper's 1939 painting, New York Movie, in which an usherette leans lost in thought against the wall of an almost empty movie palace. Ms. Hubbard and Mr. Birchler remove the specific social dimension of the Hopper painting, and in the empty Arsenal Cinema, the young protagonist seems more like a spirit inhabiting every room of the abandoned space.

The films are short loops shot in high-definition video. They deliver elliptical narratives that invite viewers to fantasize about the situation unfolding before their voyeuristic gazes. In Eight (2001), a little girl watches rain soak the remains of her birthday party, but she leaves the possibly stifling comfort of her home to cut herself one final piece of cake. Given the wordplay Ms. Hubbard and Mr. Birchler are prone to, eight is both a good guess at the protagonist's age and a reminder that when turned on its side, the number is the symbol for infinity – a fitting allusion for a 3 ½-minute looping video.

House With Pool (2004) plays out as a sort of abstract suspense film in which two women, the pool man and some wildlife occupy the same space without awareness of one another. That is, until the pool man pulls a drowned deer from the pool. Alfred Hitchcock and Claude Chabrol come to mind when watching it.

The centerpiece of "No Room to Answer" is a 54-minute documentary titled Grand Paris Texas. This new work was commissioned by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and is now in its collection. The Grand was a movie theater in downtown Paris, Texas, that operated from the silent days, when an orchestra accompanied the films, to the mid-1990s. In the past decade it has housed only pigeons.

The film is composed mostly of interviews with Paris residents, including a woman who sold candy and popcorn to soldiers shipping out for World War II from nearby Camp Maxey, one of the theater's last projectionists, and a pair of 17-year-olds who remember only the venue's final, most rundown days.

Hovering over the interviews is the memory of Wim Wenders' 1984 film, Paris, Texas, an art-house hit in its day that left many Texas Parisians befuddled after its local premiere as a fundraiser for the community theater. They expected a film named after their hometown to be on some level about their hometown.

For Ms. Hubbard and Mr. Birchler, the decayed theater, the town itself and the affecting characters they meet create a perfect mix for their elegiac contemplation of the vagaries of history and memory.

The installation in Fort Worth is a model of how a museum can accommodate video in a gallery setting, but be forewarned: You will need to plan either several visits or devote between two and three hours to fully experience this complex and remarkable exhibition.

Charles Dee Mitchell is a Dallas freelance writer.

Plan your life

"No Room to Answer" continues through Jan. 4 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. $10; free each Wednesday and first Sunday of each month. 817-738-9215 or 1-866-824-5566, www.themodern.org.