Everyone in the movie is green-screened in. The woman walking back and forth from the fireplace was never in that room. The man holding coffee has never been outside that cafe. The entire movie is real footage transformed into imaginary space.

I kept waiting for the illusion to break and for someone to look dislocated from the environment of their scene, but it never happened. The artist, Robert Campbell, is a technical precisionist. His artist's statement includes the words "hyperreal," "lensless," "infinite depth-of-field," "motion parallax," and "32-bit floating point color." He digitally collaged and animated an 87-minute dream sequence resembling a 16th-century European painting created after the introduction of LSD. Chronological time makes no sense here. Nothing happens, but it's a mysterious nothing. I had a hard time connecting to it, but I think that's part of the point. I was too busy trying to analyze where the footage came from, and how it connected to my ideas of what looks real, what looks like a photograph, and what looks like a painting.

The movie is at Cornish, where Campbell heads up new media, displayed with dreamlike lightbox panels of animated imagery. Campbell shares the gallery with a nicely contrasting survey of photo prof Preston Wadley's clear-eyed, sometimes fierce portraits of local people and places.

There's more to say about both—Campbell's film took five years to create—but the show comes down Friday, so I'll shut up and post.