Shannon Plumb

Artist and experimental filmmaker Shannon Plumb makes the outrageous believable in her comical romps, playing characters such as a pizza man, an Olympic discus thrower with Rapunzel-like hair, and a mistress saying goodbye to her lover, all with inspired exaggeration. Ironically, her first retrospective, “Film Sketches,” takes place in Bulgaria, where the national sense of humor prefers satire, and looking funny to others is a sign of social inferiority. Yet, Plumb’s extraordinary expressive range, and her ability to do so much with so little, has had international audiences amused and intrigued for years.

The exhibition primarily features Plumb’s silent shorts from 1999 to 2011. Her brief modeling career inspired Paper Collection, 2007, a film depicting a runway show of sensational butcher-paper haute couture with matching headpieces where the artist personifies eight characters from the fashion world. In Package Delivery Service from Commercials, 2002, slapstick turns poignant. A scene involving a man examining a cardboard box marked with arrows going in different directions is accompanied by a sound track of southern gospel, suggesting the confounding paths our lives take and where we eventually end up.

But the best surprise in this retrospective is Plumb’s three films from “Window Series,” 2011, that are projected at night onto the windows of the hotel rooms at the Radisson Blu Grand Hotel, which faces the National Assembly’s main building where parliament meets. In these brief private moments made public, like Woman with a Fan, 2011, where a burka-clad figure tries to cool herself, Plumb’s characters gain our empathy as they earnestly struggle with life’s challenges, be they large or small.