Stills from Anna Gaskell courtesy of Vizcaya Museum & Gardens

To expand their visibility, historical house museums have embraced collaborations with contemporary artists. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston has invited artists such as Laura Owens, Lee Mingwei and Elaine Reichek to decamp in the museum’s parlors and courtyards, and take inspiration from the embroideries and wood carvings, the gas lanterns and quaint plumbing, tiled fireplaces and stained glass that have been carefully sifted and arranged over generations. Here in Miami, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens has followed suit and launched its own Contemporary Arts Project. The first exhibition in this series, Still Life, by New York photographer Anna Gaskell, is now on view through June 1.

By their very nature, historical museums like Vizcaya are dedicated to preserving a moment in time for perpetuity. When visitors enter, they fall under a gentle spell and project themselves backward into a historical period replicated with pinpoint accuracy, their sneakers and cell phones anomalous as they peer into restored rooms to marvel at the disparity of then to now. The contemporary art world is on an entirely different track. Posterity is far off, and the shifting trends of the moment confer and take away star status with a speedy built-in obsolescence.

Anyhow, the door has been opened. Vizcaya perfectly satisfies Gaskell’s penchant for the settings of gothic novels — all spooky grottoes, ornate architecture, empty plazas and topiary mazes. The hand-painted wallpaper panorama of tall ships bouncing across the wall in the screening room for Still Life is as far away from the white cube of a contemporary art gallery or museum as possible. Heavy curtains and marble floors in the decorated room create a cocoon of darkness and provide a lot of atmosphere, more than the video work itself. For Still Life, Gaskell divided the screen into three segments, which simultaneously track the movements of a young woman walking in Vizcaya’s gardens. The loop repeats after a few moments, illustrating a brief, ambiguous interlude ad infinitum.

Gaskell has referred to her own works in photography, film and video as “elliptical narratives,” most famously adapted from Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s fantasy Alice in Wonderland. The artist revisited Alice, directing the young women in her photos to act out the suppressed eroticism and thinly veiled violence associated with adolescent girlhood on the verge of attaining womanhood. Other literary and cinematic references for Gaskell come from the Brothers Grimm and Hitchcock. From these fatalistic tales of females wrestling with the darker side of nature, including their own sexuality, Gaskell creates stark photographs with artificial lighting, original angles and dramatically cropped images. She complicates the inner lives of her various protagonists via multiplication. Alice becomes a group of Alices, in identical costume. A group of prep school students from Phillips Academy in Andover don lab coats and collectively emulate Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, this time creating their own perfect mother. The psychological charge in Gaskell’s work comes from this shattering of the heroine and then witnessing the perversions and delights of a multiple personality disorder.

The formal gardens of Vizcaya are the backdrop for Gaskell’s video, but instead of an exploration of ritualistic behavior, her female stroller seems aimless, without focus. A tourist maybe? In all three segments of the screen, the young woman walks, her back to us, followed by the camera. Is the camera stalking her? It mimics the rotations of her head as she turns right and left to look. She passes no one, enters no place in particular, until she comes upon herself. Then the movement in all three sections abruptly halts, and the loop is resumed from the beginning. After watching the loop repeat several times, it is tempting to imagine that the garden layout provides some sort of map for her walk, but it is inconclusive. Reflecting pools in the garden show the gazer an upside-down world, and so, in one of the segments the camera shifts 180 degrees to an upside-down position. The girl’s head is suspended momentarily here, and this creates a mild level of abstraction. It all seems random, disconnected from any narrative, more of a sketch or a beginner’s experiment than a finished work by an accomplished artist. Still Life misses that psychological charge that activates Gaskell’s previous works. The lighting is dull, the camera angles uninteresting, the girl seems lethargic, without depth.

When viewing an exhibition of Gaskell’s photos, the blank spaces in between each carefully staged photographic print create resting points that frame moments in a rich narrative. With a video camera in hand, and all the moments in an episode potentially available to her, Gaskell squanders many of the frames, unable to create the necessary tension her works have produced as single images. Many video artists are unable to use the element of time in a plastic way, and similarly waste all the potential formal innovations available to them: speed, stop-motion, reverse, etc. Gaskell’s previous works in time-based media have been more successful, more alive. Erasers, recently purchased by the Miami Art Museum, recounts the details of the car crash that killed Gaskell’s mother, told to the viewer by a group of young girls, each tweaking the story with varying levels of emotion and detail. In comparison, Still Life is a wan effort.

Look for a collaboration with Miami artist Cristina Lei Rodriguez and Chicago-based theater and film artist Catherine Sullivan up next on Vizcaya’s Contemporary Arts Project calendar, beginning in November. Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, located at 3251 S. Miami Ave. between Brickell Avenue and Coconut Grove, is open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.vizcayamuseum.org or call 305-250-9133.