Matthew Buckingham’s exhibition Where Will We Live? at the Glassell School of Art can be compared to the films of Robert Bresson, which capture life’s ineffable qualities. Bresson constructed shots so that events occurred off screen with only the sound perceptible; with multiple events occurring both on and off screen Bresson offered radically fragmented cinematic narratives. Yet his focus on characters' blank stares and downward gazes told a story through facial expressions. With characters and their words rendered as pictorial abstractions—yet still somehow based in reality—Bresson’s films leave a sense of incompleteness as his narratives and subjects fragment into other narratives and subjects. Featuring guides that lead or lose their characters or viewers, Bresson’s films and their multiple stories are defined by wandering, a sensibility present in Buckingham’s exhibition. Buckingham’s speculative futures, combined with historical narratives, create a series of works that play with how subjects perceive and construct their worlds.

Billed as a survey of Buckingham’s work, Where Will We Live? doesn’t operate as a retrospective but rather a tightly-knit investigation of a section of Buckingham's work. Activating pockets of space throughout the corridor/hallway exhibition space that Glassell occupies, the exhibition constructs a series of narratives through sculptural objects, static images and moving image works. The newest work in the exhibition, Where Will We Live? (2011), is conceptually central and speaks to our uncertain political and economic situation. The video projection is deceptively playful in nature, since viewers sit on toddler-sized chairs while watching a video that depicts youngsters constructing a city out of colored paper. Buckingham’s depiction of children represents the future (as children tend to do) even as the film remains grounded in the present as a childlike game. The children label different items throughout the film and place the labels on a larger sheet of paper. Brightly colored paper represents the city’s varied needs: roads, buildings, and the like. The children’s playful construction evokes questions about how we formulate relations or how societies decide to construct cities, or maybe how a city can simultaneously exist as a text or as a series of signs. The city itself becomes both a constructed object as well as an imagined place.

Likeness (2009) is a large-scale installation more centrally located in the exhibition and significantly larger. Built like a storage space with stacked wooden creates, moving blankets and stanchion ropes that enclose a film projection, the work manifests as a structural dwelling of sorts or the remnants of someone’s belongings. Because of the bizarre architectural nature of Glassell’s space, Likeness can be experienced from two distinct angles: one on the ground through either of the building’s two entrances, or from above looking down (a vantage point often left underused or unconsidered). In this makeshift dwelling space Buckingham creates a moment of reveal. The wooden crates obscure the image or film projections while the sound of someone’s voice draws viewers closer; it’s a technique that Bresson used in his films. The sounds of people walking or unseen trains give the viewer a sense of action happening behind or outside of the frame. Everything feels continuous even if the action itself is not placed front and center; here what is unseen remains part of what is seen.

Likeness’s Spanish voiceover draws viewers around its half moon-shaped enclosure, where various images of dogs appear projected. Further investigation reveals the origin of these images: “a detail from a 1659 Velázquez painting that portrays child-prince Felipe Prospero with his pet.”1  The voice asks you to consider who you are looking at. Because the image points to a dog instead of a human subject, Likeness compels viewers to construct an unknown subject’s identity from an unseen portrait. Using sound to point outward from the image, Buckingham bends back into history while questioning our future.

• 1. Taken from the press release's description of the work: http://mfah.org/news/pressrelease/where-will-we-live/