At the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery until December 7

Perhaps they were tourists, lost on a rainy day at the University of British Columbia. They walked into the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, through the exhibition of David Claerbout's multiple video installations, and out again—in less than five minutes. They appeared confused and apparently didn't notice that the Belgian artist's work demands and rewards prolonged and patient observation. That, as it manipulates the aesthetic and narrative conventions of photography and film, it asks us to reconsider our experience of time and space. Or that it often slows or isolates movement to the almost indiscernible flutter of a leaf, an eyelid, a strand of hair.

Yes, indeed, Claerbout expects much more than a cursory encounter between his audience and his digitally altered still and moving images. The show's seven video projections and one monitor installation vary in viewing time from six minutes and 33 seconds to 60 minutes to, well, potentially forever, as two of them run on an endless loop with no detectable beginning or end. A barefoot woman in a rocking chair on a wooden porch, an unhappy cat and an anxious bird stranded together in a cage, sweaty square dancers flash-lit in a community hall, a woman pouring a cup of coffee in front of a beautiful villa, the setting sun reflected in the windows of a train station—most of these scenarios unfold slowly, slowly, slowly, whether played in real or altered time.

Claerbout uses such setups to pose questions about cinematic experience, scientific perspective, and the framing and fictionalizing of an image. He also investigates the ways in which architecture gives tangible form to space and how duration relates structurally to time. Again, he works these themes through the historic and contemporary relationship between film and still photography. This relationship is most immediately addressed in Ruurlo, Bocurloscheweg 1910, a projection of an antique postcard image into which subtle movement has been introduced digitally.

Claerbout's effects are often achieved by the silent play of sun and shadow across the faí§ade of a building, or the subtle sifting of the wind through leaves and branches. He has a fondness for juxtapositions of nature and culture, often locating his scenarios in pastoral landscapes significantly claimed by architectural structures: a villa, a windmill, a swimming pool.

That confused couple, the tourists who rushed through Claerbout's show, might be interested to know that the complete running time of Bordeaux Piece, the one work here in which actors speak, is 13 hours and 43 minutes long. (On Sunday, November 23, the gallery plans extended viewing hours, from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m., so that the work can unfold in full.) Unlike, say, Andy Warhol's famous Empire, eight hours and five minutes of a static camera aimed at the faí§ade of the Empire State Building, Bordeaux Piece repeats the same sequence of seven dramatic shots over and over and over through the course of a day. From before dawn until after dusk, the same short fiction—love, money, betrayal—is enacted 70 times. Eventually, Claerbout explains in the exhibition brochure, conditions of light and darkness take precedence over the short, soap-operatic narrative.

Like so much of his work, Bordeaux Piece employs the sun's rays as a means of measuring and shaping our experience of time.

It's a lovely concept, but too demanding of that very quantity it explores. Still, Claerbout's show is beautiful to behold.