'Vertical Hold' is an engaging effort to expand video boundaries

"Vertical Hold," the magnetic collection of experimental video and sound curated by Justin Colt Beckman and Andrew Kaufman at Punch Gallery, features a handful of works that push the boundaries of the medium in engaging ways.

These include Luciana Lamothe's "Auto Material" a 10-minute spree of pranks and vandalism in which the artist sabotages a bathroom stall, drags a plant through a lobby, presses all the buttons on an apartment building's intercom and harrowingly cradles a chain saw in a canoe. It's "Jackass" without the machismo and Richard Kern's early films without narrative.

Brian Bress' "The Portrait Room" is four minutes of comedy with echoes of performance art duo The Kipper Kids.

Most delightful is James Sham's "Opera Telephone," in which eight adults play the childhood game of telephone with an aria from Puccini as their source material.

Beckman and Kaufman flesh out the stunts and pranks of these videos with Stefanos Paulankis' sound piece, Adriane Little's "Invoice," which adds up war dead in a penny toss, Kaufman's beautiful "Conquest of the Air," a collaborative effort to create a paper airplane, and Beckman's "Flight of Isosceles," a collaboration with a pigeon.

Noon-5 p.m. Friday-Sunday through Nov. 25 at Punch Gallery, 119 Prefontaine Place S.; 509-964-2443

-- Nate Lippens

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