The effect of The Plot is similar to a theatre adaptation of an English textbook written, rehearsed, and performed by children in the space of an evening. Emma-Kate Guimond’s video performance possesses the curious quality of being earnestly reverse-engineered from a formula of narrative devices. It’s a little confusing, very delirious, and while I left thoroughly charmed, it would be inaccurate to imply the experience was merely or immediately agreeable. Like a young actor-director supplementing performance with explanation, The Plot demonstrates the expediency of language, but, heavy with words and bloated by suggested meaning, the work also illustrates how easy language is to get lost in.

Extended by its careful installation at Centre CLARK, The Plot rests on the premise of a missing original called “The Source.” Wearing the definite article as a mark of true, almost religious singularity, The Source haunts The Plot’s three central characters— “The Protagonist,” “The Writer,” and “The Voice Actor” (later “The Dancer”)—who instead waver in the relativity that comes with being a type. The three actors who play them also do so abstractly, tasked with improvising movement in response to a score that’s not heard in the final edit. Taking turns as “The Teller,” characters narrate themselves and each other in third person, which further muddles their identities, and in a matter-of-fact tone that pairs uncomfortably with their surreal gestural vocabulary of prodded flesh and gaping mouths. The Teller’s version of events is at once suspect—subject to subtle variations between accounts, and the distortion suggested by phones, videoconferencing, and a shift from English to French—and definitive. Wielding momentary narrative control, each Teller adds new terms that throw the story, its characters, and the viewer off-course. Made further duplicitous by the appearance of mirrors, cameras, and screens, The Plot presents a quasi-social exercise, shared by characters who are still “figuring things out” and an audience made responsible for discerning them, in reorienting oneself to unstable meaning and shifting perspectives.

Soliciting the first of many soon-to-be-subverted expectations, the opening lines of The Plot introduce The Protagonist (twice) and her (then his) desire to make a movie. “What are you scared of?” asks his companionable Dog. Rather than a movie about making a movie, The Plot, better predicted by the Dog, unfolds one episode after another in thwarted creative partnerships and projects, beset by ego, insecurity, and questionable intentions. The Protagonist asks The Writer, who “he admires both sexually and professionally,” to collaborate. The Writer wants a new voice (!!), hires The Voice Actor, and schemes to steal his (!!!). As it builds—a process the title highlights—The Plot and its characters assume and shed new significations. The Writer, a Tortured (hot) Genius, squints, presses her fingertips together, and transforms. She directs the Dog, now her evil henchman, to snatch the new voice. Supplanting the subtly inscribed politics of gender and voice with the peculiar moralistic brutality of a didactic myth, this climax—also the Dancer’s origin story— works like many uncanny parabolic and allegorical constructions in The Plot; it presents familiarly, in the shape of a story with a message to impart, but it never specifies one.

There’s a pervasive sense of non-resolution in The Plot. Every obtuse symbol functions to set up the audience because, as Hanako Hoshimi-Caines writes in the exhibition text, the lost Source is “[a] post-structural prank.” In two text-based companion pieces, Guimond put the video’s non-committal symbolism to writing, with the quality of a cipher. On a table across from the screen, fragments of text laid out like evidence of a crime or findings from an archeological dig suggested a deconstructive approach to the work. In these declarative sentences, apparently action cues or qualifications for The Plot and its characters, I found the promise of an explanation. I took the bait. I contemplated everything I’d ever read, lamented it didn’t amount to more, and then stared at my own reflection. Because, in a tidy encapsulation of the punchline, the surface of the table was mirrored. Bobbing beneath text and its double, my head clouded my reading, a personalized lesson in context-contingency and the mutability of meaning.

Not to be contained to something so tidy as a punchline, this essential meaninglessness is also the medium through which Guimond reflects the messy intricacies of interdependence. After The Protagonist enlists The Writer so as to become the filmmaker he knows he is, and after what’s subsequently referred to as “the dog incident,” The Voice Actor (robbed of their voice) makes a name for themselves as The Dancer and stages a debut in which they perform as The Writer (who stole it). Then, in the final scene, a question comes: “Who is the most relatable character?” Answering herself, The Teller makes an overwrought case for The Protagonist, and I realize he was missing through most of the video. It’s an intelligent caricature of the empty-vessel-main-character. But unlike the trope, Guimond’s Protagonist and his peers are written with decisively indistinct personalities. It’s a credit to their actors and the chemistry between them that The Writer, The Protagonist, and The Voice Actor/Dancer emerge as precise and endearing portraits of insecure youth. From within tender and domineering entanglements, embodied articulations of confusion, impressionability, and self-doubt give a human face to The Plot’s pitiless indeterminacy, and emphasize the stakes of bearing witness to it.

As a victim of The Plot’s practical joke, I was made painfully aware of my preconceptions. The work’s screening environment, which was set up like a continuation of the video’s modest theatre setting, rounded out what was a thoroughly self-conscious experience. Effectively recast from gallery visitor to the role of “The Audience,” and implicated by watching it, The Plot also trained my attention to the act of looking and its consequences. Listening to The Teller expose the interior lives of other characters with an unnerving lucidity I never want turned on me, I appreciated The Plot’s fickle provocations to look harder, and then ease up, but never look away; asking first to be figured out, The Plot reveals itself to be unsubstantial but cautions against drawing one’s own conclusions. Completely vulnerable to The Teller’s overbearing gaze, without which they would not have stories, The Writer, The Protagonist, and The Voice Actor/Dancer are caught between the threat of being defined and the necessity of being recognized. I empathize with their predicament, because I am in more or less the same one. We all are.