Preceded by:Scale (Irit Batsry, France, 1995). In a tribute to Giacometti, this work investigates the space surrounding the human figure and how this corporeal reference effects the visual landscape. (12 mins)Part fable, part speculative fiction, Passage to Utopia describes an hallucinatory journey through worlds that never existed, events that never occurred. An exquisitely drafted trilogy, Batsry's work leads us from a "traumatic past...towards an evocation of our fears and dreams of the future." Civilizations come and go, time collapses, and history becomes a cipher of personal consciousness. To parallel the mechanisms of recall, this New York-based artist uses analog and digital image-processing in her elegant renderings of abstracted tableaux. In Parts I and II, Stories from the Old Ruin (1986, 15 mins) and Leaving the Old Ruin (1989, 34 mins), the loss of place, of cultural grounding, is at the poetic center. The past and its ruins are abandoned for the dream of a utopian future. The polished culmination of the trilogy, Traces of a Presence to Come (1993, 39 mins) speculates on the evolution of another species, marveling at the possibilities in a Marker-like manner. Over agile images, a narrator tells of the restructuring of perception, of new languages needed to describe rarefied experience, while wraithlike beings shed their flesh in the ether. Batsry's triadic tale gets at the very nature of identity and language as it paints "a metaphor of another universe being created."-Steve Seid