The curtains are drawn at Crawl Space gallery, and Zach Rockhill's new video If Dreams Were Lightning is playing on the big wall. The video is three minutes thirty-three seconds long. It is a fractured piece, so it wants a fractured criticism.

If Dreams Were Lightning is a nerd's paradise, a meta-metastasis, a piece of art with content so congruent to form that it rides a beautiful loop circuit through the brain. Taking up most of the screen is a model house made of foam core and plywood that is being built by a pair of hands. They are the artist's hands.

The roof is set down, then lifts off. An eave is hot-glued on, drops away; a staircase appears, disappears. The house is spray-painted orange, white, black, red, yellow. The colors bleed into a nuclear sunset, or the next monochrome obliterates the last quickly and brutally. As decorators say, everything changes with a coat of paint.

These events happen physically (a hand removes the roof, sprays the paint), but they also happen digitally—poof and the roof is gone, the color other. Parts of the screen switch to another channel, introducing an alternative feed, but of the same subject: the house at an earlier or later moment in its construction-deconstruction, when it was another color, another shape, another scale.

Which of these jangling segments are memories and which are futures? Nothing too romantic is allowed, since a caged lightbulb adds a glaring, no-frills cast. The video surface, like the house, is morphing, being cut up and divided and changed. If Dreams Were Lightning is a videocollage based not on the collision of disparate things but on the explosion of a single thing. It is a highly crafted sculpture but also a performance. A soundtrack resembles the vague noise of tape being fast-forwarded or rewound. Nothing, nothing, nothing will sit still.

In historical terms, If Dreams Were Lightning descends from all those flying parts compressed inside a frame by Picasso and Braque, from the hand-carved-up derelict buildings and reconstitutive photocollages of Gordon Matta-Clark (and, later, voracious photocollages by the painter David Hockney), from the perception experiments of '60s artists like Dan Graham, from the one-after-anotherism of the serial minimalists. It wishes fragments were complete. It is a bit of YouCubism.

Rockhill is an artist full of pasts: His most widely known is Allan Kaprow, the late Happenings artist whose works Rockhill has repeatedly been called upon to reenact—most recently at this summer's Venice Biennale. For Rockhill's reinterpretation of Kaprow's 1961 environment Stockroom in Venice, the artist added components from the 1961 novel about alienation from past times and other places, Solaris, underscoring the overlying question: Why such hunger for reenactments?

Rockhill names his Seattle show STOCKGAP after Stockroom, indicating a link but also a disconnect between his work and his historical reenactments. He also reprises a Kaprow secret in the gallery handout—involving a fellow named Theodore Tucker, and Tucker's authoritative words about "the vapid glories, qualities, and eternities which we think are History."

Like Corin Hewitt's photography performances, which yield series of images of the endless coming and going of materials—decaying food reproduced as sculpture, both fixed in a photographic image, that image later reappearing in another image or in the compost bin to support the growth of new food in the kitchen-studio—Rockhill works with ordinary props and without a starting point, origin, or fixed view.

If Dreams Were Lightning is a frantic marriage of time and space. The house shifts, the ground shifts, and everything is constantly remade because everything is in the process either of becoming or becoming located. This is about physics and mechanics and art history, sure, but who can't relate? Space is limited, time is running out, something better or more could always happen.

Even after watching If Dreams Were Lightning—and Rockhill's other video in STOCKGAP, in which an environment is similarly put together, taken apart, but never seen in an original or whole state—there is still an embedded narrative you don't know. The artist is from Kansas.

Kansas and model houses mean only one thing, as the artist's statement confirms:

Rockhill drew on personal experience and the parallel crises of 1893 with today's economic collapse, both fueled by rampant property speculation. The earlier crisis inspired L. Frank Baum, a socialist, to write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in part as a secret screed: the tornado drops the farm house on the Wicked Witch of the East—i.e., the eastern banking interests that created the crisis.

In the center of Rock­hill's rescrambling moving picture is where the "alternative" broadcasts of the house appear. That center zone can be seen as a window inside the window of the projection—a window where images blow past as if by the force of weather, even as the house spins. It's like Dorothy's view out the window of Auntie Em's. And to underline the housing-crisis theme, the house in If Dreams Were Lightning has no foundation. It sits on a hole.

A line of dripping hot glue where a part, pushed on, failed to adhere to the house; a tropical gush caused by too many layers of spray paint applied too fast; tall, dark shadows cast by the caged lightbulb climbing the walls inside the house: If Dreams Were Lightning is driven by ideas, but it's powered by a visceral quality not unlike that of the most heroic paintings and the nastiest horror flicks. The old stereotype that ideas and objects are hostile to one another is defeated in this work, and so is the old stereotype that video and photography are aphysical. This work comes from the whole body. As the image of the house fades to a digital ghost at video's end, the artist's hand spray-paints white the physical surfaces. The effect is equivalent.