Common roots often nourish a common aesthetic. And so it is with artists working within the influence of a black diaspora. Philip Mallory Jones, whose history with video art goes back some twenty years, has actively pursued an aesthetic that would unite a culturally dispersed people through a collective visual language. The source of this emerging language is intuitive, relying on a mutual iconography and a vision that seeks to interpret the African diaspora experience. Jones works with both single-channel and multi-channel video, crafting evocative, rhythmic tapes that combine archetypical imagery with non-verbal storytelling. Tonight's program features two single-channel works, Jembe and Wassa, and two multi-channel works, Footprints and Dreamkeeper, that will be simultaneously displayed on three monitors. Employing exquisite footage shot in Burkina Faso and Angola, these experimental narratives thrive on the tension between the modernity of the electronic medium and the antiquity of their subject. Religious icons, African drumming, and scenes from everyday life commingle in melodious odes to the struggles of the spirit. Politically engaged and aesthetically playful, Philip Mallory Jones wrestles with the video medium as a cultural form specific to a nascent diaspora consciousness. His videoworks are signposts on a road leading to illumination. Steve Seid