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DREAMSCAPE: Rabbia creates a montage of images from Mrs. Gardner’s Chinese scrapbook intercut with her own video and animation.

Rabbia’s 27-minute video, which is now on view at the museum along with Gardner’s scrapbook, begins (and also ends) with an image from the cover of the scrapbook before proceeding in one long, leisurely pan past Gardner’s photos of temples, pagodas, and palaces. Rabbia cuts out sections and inserts her own video (gliding birds, billowing clouds, rolling waters, waving branches, fire) and bits of animation.

Water floods a lavishly appointed room (the home of a British regional governor). A whirlpool (perhaps the drain of a bath) spins in the center of a harbor. A pair of men hold guitar-like stringed instruments. Growing branches of a tree burn. Sculptures of dragons hold a globe in an astrological garden. The photos are organized not by chronology or geography but by the way one flows visually into the next, as in the disjointed order of memories.

Rabbia’s primary addition is blue lines that snake across the ground, wiggling around feet and landscapes and buildings, sometimes sprouting upward. She sees them as trees and roots. “The tree is a collection of time in itself, and roots are an expression of that,” she tells me at the museum. “And these roots have rings all around which are like the rings of time past. It’s a link from the past to the present.”

The blue lines also suggest water or veins or, when they sprout up, penises. At one point, blue lines zigzagging across a sepia landscape produce throbbing red rivers of what appears to be blood. Later a full moon rises with pulsing veins inside. (It’s actually a scan of a beating heart that Rabbia found on-line.)

Other strange visions appear: a metal ostrich lays a blue marbled egg; a naked woman lies in a courtyard and a tree sprouts from her crotch; two prisoners wait with square boards locked around their necks; a lynched individual swings from a tree; at the back of a procession people carry a breathing cocooned body atop a litter (actually a photo of a Peking wedding procession transformed here into a funeral). There is a vague suggestion of things falling apart.