The new millennium is coming "to get you, its jaws open wide. But don't flinch! After all, the millennium is only a human concept, a moment in time to which we've assigned great power and meaning. Why fear it? If we only will it, this millennium needn't bring the apocalypse, but a revolution in consciousness instead.

Artists Keith Piper and Ramona Ramlochand are devotees of a transformative rather than an apocalyptic vision of our times. In their Ottawa Art Gallery installation, The Night Has A Thousand Eyes, they have created audio and video components that are so strong, they mesmerize the eye and drill directly to your heart.

Before going in to see the installation, you might stop in front of the square mirror hanging on the title wall, but not for long. The installation's enigmatic sound track, a medley of ritual chants, riffs on oriental strings, and thundering drums, draws you into the darkened gallery. Inside you'll find two large black boxes positioned a metre from the wall. Two circular images approximately one metre tall are projected onto the wall from inside these boxes.

The left "eye" shows the view from a black-and-white surveillance cam-era, which you'll soon realize is spying on the gallery's entrance. Hiding behind a two-way mirror on the title wall, this camera records your dawdling as you come in, and projects it into the gallery space.

The right "eye" of this binocular projection is a colour videotape loop.

In it, Ramlochand beams slides of lions and palm trees onto the torsos of brown-skinned models. The wear these exotic travelogue photos like silk scarves made of light. A woman in a turban does a hoochy-coochy wriggle, while a tropical landscape plays across her back. A black man's hand plucks in vain at the image of an African idol on his body; like a tattoo, it won't come off.

The surveillance camera of the left eye is a distancing device. It symbolizes our distrust of others, and a certain impoverishment of the human spirit. The right eye's viewpoint is in a kind of delirium, where we project our notions of purity, exoticism and noble savagery onto the Other.

(Weighing these two viewpoints, I felt the need for a third eye, one that wasn't blinded by fear or fantasies.)

There's more sleight of hand with projections and reflections in Ramlochand's Journey to Nowhere. She has mounted a backlit screen inside a doorframe, and positioned it so that it's reflected in the glass of two of the gallery's doors. The viewer is caught sandwiched between reflections, on a journey down an endless office corridor. This corridor is haunted by a mirage of sunlit trees and blue sky. Ramlochand places the viewer in limbo, between a paradise lost and the workaday world

You can break Ramlochand's spell by moving on to Piper's The Exploded City, another dense, multimedia installation. Piper has projected a digitally animated video onto a wall-sized curtain. You're confronted with an archaic-looking tower, boxed in on three sides by scenes of race riots and rush-hour traffic. Like the Wizard of Oz, a giant woman's head, as solemn as a Renaissance angel, appears. With the measured intonation of a narrator on a BBC documentary, she tells the story of the city of Babel. Piper invites us to reconsider this tale about confounding the language of all hu-manity. If one of the underlying beliefs of Western culture is that cultural misunderstanding is divinely ordained, that we shouldn't aspire to communicate well for fear that we'll be punished for our overweening pride, then we're in trouble. The contemporary urban core is culturally fractured and divisive, a dangerous place. Only a revolution in human consciousness could save Piper's violent and chaotic city.

You can bet that Piper and Ramlochand won't flinch as the new millennium approaches, flashing its mirrored teeth. They'll be extracting its canines, to hold them up to us, showing a jagged and illuminating reflection.

The Night has a Thousand Eyes: Keith Piper, Ramona Ramlochand continues until Nov. 23 at the Ottawa Art Gallery, 2 Daly Ave. Curator Sylvia Fortin will give a talk about the exhibit Oct. 23 at 7:30 p.m.

Virginia Howard is a freelance writer.