Plot Summary

With a static camera Tan films the dense night-time traffic in West Los Angeles from her temporary studio location at the Getty Center. Undercutting the cinematic quality inherent in this view of teeming traffic, the upright frame instead suggests a domestic window or an abstract painting. The space is flattened, and the viewer is unsettled. Shorn of a narrative, Vertical Red is part of a trio of video works that are a series of dream-like moving pictures.