“The light at the end of the tunnel is just another tunnel,” says the drone operator character in Omer Fast’s video 5000 Feet Is the Best (2011), and it might be the structuring logic not only of the work as a whole but also of the two other videos in this exhibition. The universe of these works seems especially porous, with human drives, as manifested in war, in sex, in the family dynamic, continually shuttling characters to ends that aren’t actually ends at all but just new coordinates in a multidimensional field. Identities change. Scenes repeat in different form. Both Continuity (2012) and Spring (2016) center on a German couple and their soldier son. In the latter video, the parents compulsively carry out past family moments, including a dinner seen in Continuity, with a teenager the father has hired to play the role of the (presumably dead) son. The work somehow throws the strange psychological terrain of the entire show into relief. It is as though we are now surveying from five thousand feet up—hovering at mid-altitude, where everything below appears relatively sharp and relationships can be seen more clearly. —Kyle Bentley
Pictured: Omer Fast, Spring, 2016, HD video with five screens projection, 40 minutes. Courtesy James Cohan, New York.