Fictional closure is perhaps Man's greatest gift to himself. The neatly wrapped narrative, the elegant solution, the redeeming denouement: all of these elements declare the assumed integrity of everyday life, forwarding hope and coherence as intrinsic to nature. As an artist and theorist, Steve Fagin attacks the problem of narrativity, of psychological constructs, with a vigor and breadth that is epic in a field characterized by brevity. Using historical fact swamped by the imaginary, a wild range of literary allusion, and many a psychoanalytic pronouncement, Fagin's narrative form confounds the single interpretation. Visually, he clutters the image with unusual, associative objects: falsified maps, exotic postcards, manipulated artworks. Fagin compares these boxed-in images to Joseph Cornell's "little coffins." They function as dense arenas for subjective contemplation. Virtual Play... takes the persona of Lou Andréas-Salomé-a convulsive figure in early 20th Century culture-as its departure point. Barely visible but always present, Andréas-Salomé is submerged in a tableau that continually undercuts its ability to (re)present. Anecdotes from Anna Freud, a burning Taj Mahal, the puns of a young girl, and a debate with Nietzche's sister Elisabeth, serve as inconclusive shards of a subject. The Amazing Voyage... sails a similar tack, but now with greater confidence and a lusher sense of the pictorial. A fragmented travelogue, Fagin's newest work takes two writers, Flaubert, staid and deliberate, and Roussel, jaded and delirious, and sends them reeling through some hazy museum of the Other. This imagined topography of unearthly obsessions and cultures in ruin refuses closure, but tantalizes with the pleasures of the text. Steve Seid Please note: There will be a fifteen-minute intermission between videotapes.