Always situated within stagy settings, Gary Kibbins's works are like anxious allegories, standing in for odd theories and conceits. In Mead Lake (1992, 27 mins), two academicians wander across Los Angeles while discussing the rhetorical deceptions of an article about the World Bank. Simultaneously, an ever more complicated account of Hoover Dam reveals a history of detached facts-knowability becomes an act of faith. P & Not-P (1994, 27 mins) begins with the premise that something can have characteristics even if it doesn't exist. "P," the conceptual protagonist, is just such an entity. By film's end, we realize that the flexibility of perception allows us to deny aspects of reality we'd rather not acknowledge. A work of speculative fiction, The Alien Seaman (1998, 20 mins) tells the story of a sailor whose life has been bracketed by two harbor explosions, one at Halifax in 1917, the other at Galveston in 1947. Unwilling to accept this happenstance, the seaman creates the logic necessary to reverse cause and effect. Endlessly unusual, Kibbins's intriguing, moving images show us that what we know could be otherwise.-Steve Seid