Going to museums these days increasingly involves sitting to videos, and there couldn't be two more different ones on the different ends of campus at UConn currently.
For Alfredo Jaar's "We Wish to Inform You that We didn't Know" at the Contemporary Art Galleries, the modest space was transformed into a darkened wooden screening room where inside the sanctum, three screens of video play on the half hour.
It's a literal return of sorts of to Rwanda, where the politically conscious artist has spent time before. Called back to create a memorial, he films some memorials to the genocide there that have already been built, but precedes it with a speech from Bill Clinton in which he apologizes for ignoring the situation between the Hutu and Tutsi and for refraining at first from even recognizing it as genocide.
There are harrowing interviews, too, with survivors who mostly had to play dead in the mass graves until they could safely crawl out.
Opposite that somber images and dark times is the bright colors of Abby Manock's installation at the William Benton Museum of Art. "CounterMart" is a fleshing out of a scene from her video "Counters" that follows a world where five different colors in order pack, travel, go t a store, buy a beverage, before the store is held up by five bandits with five different colored ski-masks and guns. And as each of the five colors repeat the same scene, a voice says "one-two-three-four-five" over and over, like a preschool counting exercise gone wrong.
It's all meant to contrast the cheery idealism of childhood with the dark realities of the adult world (or at least the fears within it - not every store is held up at all let alone five times in a row). Accompanying the film is the herringbone patterned playground the Brooklyn artist used for this particular segment.
The bright colors and handrawn innocence, combined with the smiley faces on every surface make it just about the opposite of the other art video on campus.
"CounterMart" continues at the Benton through May 9; "We Wish to Inform You that We Didn't Know" continues at the Contemporary Art Galleries through April 22.