Video Macabre

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Two very different but complementary musings on death make up a well-curated double feature in the video lounge at Philadelphia's Vox Populi gallery--one of that city's many distinguished artist-run collectives--through September 29. Virgina-based Lydia Moyer contributes 'Paradise,' a study of a headline-making 2006 shooting in a secluded Amish community in Pennsylvania, in which a man from the neighboring community broke into a one-room schoolhouse and took the girls in the class as hostages before executing them. The families of the victims responded by consoling the gunman's relatives in what Moyer's work paints as an extraordinary act of forgiveness. In contrast to the violence setting Moyer's video in motion, Tennessee -based Hope Tucker's half of the program shows comparatively meditative work from her roughly 15-part 'Obituary Project.' Like a newspaper recounting the high points of a deceased person's life, Tucker's video series offers selective portraits of people, places, and objects in the process of fading out of existence. While they seem worlds apart in both style and subject, each work makes reference to video's history as a medium of both documentary and personal memory.