Works by Scott Rankin, Gary Hill and Peter Rose Language as it dictates perception has long been a concern of visual artists. After all, this artificial system for organizing experience shapes our very relationship to the world. In Gary Hill's brief but fanciful Site/Recite (1989, 4 mins), a table-top of discarded objects-egg shells, a skull, butterfly wings, a seed pod-is scrutinized in a wave of seamless close-ups. A poetic narration, linked through cadence to the camera's movements, muses on the contiguity of perception and lingual self-consciousness. With unimpeded glee, Peter Rose's Siren (1990, 14 mins) proposes an operatic rendering of W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions. This is a strange journey through metaphysical thickets, beneath tangled voices, to a labyrinth where bewitching words lead us deeper into oblivion. Scott Rankin's This and That (Part Two) (1987-90, 45:15 mins) investigates the manner in which experience is transformed into metaphor, memory and culture. Rankin employs an elaborate framing of landscape, architecture and objects, and a quizzical array of languages, in this beautifully rendered travelog of "seeing." Rankin's enterprising work finds resonance in speech and image that exists outside the confines of semantic meaning. --Steve Seid