The screens are intended to be viewed simultaneously and – in a departure from prevailing video installation practice – from beginning to end, the narrative unfolding much like a documentary film in multiple windows.

Two other major installations in the exhibition, Signal and Twilight, reach into the same tomb of images as Disturbance, but emerge with a more tonal, brooding and mysterious expression – an electronic elegy in black and white. Signal offers a brief, disquieting loop that suggests catastrophe in three amorphous events. Twilight, a trio of monitors mounted along a vertical column, also employs abstract, high-contrast images for a meditative evocation of ghostly breakdown.

Constellation turns toward the concrete, considering social history as television history. Ten TVs are arrayed along two walls, each monitor featuring an image of prominence from Disturbance: 22 Minutes of Television Images from April 29 – May 2, 1992. These images wax and wane, as scrolling text briefly details their elemental role in the drama.

Finally, the short, silent installation Inspection points to the murky sequence that once served as television's grand obsession.

For Disturbance, the Anderson Gallery’s second floor will be transformed into a dark theatre-like space to more fully experience these provocative and often disconcerting works. Notes the Anderson Gallery’s Assistant Director and Curator of Collections, Amy Moorefield, “We are pleased to premiere the exhibition Disturbance by video artist and VCUarts faculty member Bob Paris at the Anderson Gallery. Disturbance unveils the brutal and callous commercialization of human suffering and tragedy of the 1992 Los Angeles riots. In a time where nothing is beyond the camera’s lens, this exhibition is a calculated composition of the narrow boundaries separating private and public spectacle.”

Artist Bob Paris has exhibited at the Whitney Biennial, the Image Forum Festival in Tokyo, and Documenta IX in Germany, and his documentary work has aired on public television. His projects frequently use appropriated imagery to form critiques of mass media and popular culture.