It would be a mistake to try to sum up As If by Chance, Vera Frenkel’s newly completed two-channel video and print installation. But an entry point to this multivalent, moving – in both senses – picture could be in the notion that there are many ways of telling a story.

In most traditions a story is linear. We speak of a story arc, a climax, a resolution, a beginning, a middle and an end. Indeed video – remember tape? – is a linear medium. But poetry, music, painting and dance tell us that a story can be multilayered, circular, non-chronological and open-ended.

The title As If by Chance, says a note about the work, alludes to “an inter-generational card game, evidence of which was found by the police after a Toronto art centre was closed by the City.”  The complex video work began with a film shoot Frenkel organized in which seven elders, all older than 70 and seven children, all 10 or younger, were paired, seated at a glass table and given paints, brushes and markers.  Colourful cards were displayed, which the participants turned over to reveal words – boat, or sky, house or flower — that were prompts for the creation of art works. Naturally, conversations between young and old ensued.

As in previous works of hers, Vera acts as narrator, lending her even-toned statements to a voiceover that is convincingly objective. But she also provokes with statements such as, “I’m telling the story from the end again. That’s what happens when there are so many beginnings.”

The narrative has at least three strands. One story line is mostly descriptive, the voiceover explaining how the children “painted their dreams” and the elders were “mapping their memories.” There’s also the underlying saga of the art centre promised by the City as a place for working artists to call their own. Through political jockeying and outright lying, the artists are cheated out of the space, the property instead turned over to a laundromat.

And then there’s the story of Natasha, the narrator’s landlady. Natasha has evicted the narrator who lived in an upstairs apartment, possibly to make way for the art centre, which is Natasha’s project. Except for her love of Russian poetry and a possible connection Russian interference in our elections – art centres serving as covers for espionage – we know nothing about Natasha.

She has gone missing; we get no clues as to how and why. The narrator refers to the disappearance from time to time, but the implication is that some mysteries are never solved. For the viewer, the mention of Natasha’s absence heightens the immediacy of the exchanges between the elders and the youngsters.

Adding yet another dimension to the composition is William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The title is superimposed on the scene of the card game early on in the video. At random intervals, Blake’s illustrated, hand-printed poem “The Tyger” floats into view. A five-year-old girl, who surely can’t be familiar with Blake, is drawing a tiger, meticulously painting in the stripes and sharing the task with her twin sister. Their innocence is expressed in this spontaneous artmaking. Blake’s metaphysics included a “higher innocence,” a recovered innocence, now informed by experience.  The artists among the elders could be an example of this higher or “organized” innocence that allows for self-expression without self-consciousness.

As If by Chance proceeds through a flow of moving and still images, written and spoken words. Sometimes the images, black and white in one stream, richly coloured in another, overlap each other. Digital prints of stills extracted from the videos, hang on the walls of the Charles Street Video premises, where Frenkel and her co-editor Konrad Skręta have been toiling for many months to make As If by Chance.  

The viewer is a necessary participant, not just passively watching, but interpreting the flow of juxtaposed words and images to complete the artistic process. We observe an elder drawing a spiral and associate it with the hand of a child drawing a circle. A simple statement, such as “the present, as usual, is invisible,” offers another insight. Of course: we see the past and the future in pictures, not so the present.    

After 30 minutes, the video comes to an end, but then comes Part 2, a rearranging of the video elements as if the author were telling the story from another perspective.

As If by Chance is surprising, absorbing, spiked with subtle wit, and a little bit challenging. As the credits roll after another 30 minutes, this viewer’s immediate reaction was, “I’ve got to see this again.”

As If by Chance

By Vera Frenkel

Screening November 26, 12 pm to 4 pm; November 27, 6 pm to 8 pm; November 29, 12 pm to 4 pm.

Charles Street Video, 76 Geary Avenue, Toronto