Of two videos by Jessica Bronson at Anna Helwing Gallery, the more modest and unassuming one is finally the more compelling. The other is a kick to look at, with its high-intensity color and kaleidoscopic views. But "golden itself," as the three-monitor work is titled, has the cumulative virtue of environmental ambience on its side.

"Golden itself" is a simple exercise in video depth of field. Bronson's stationary camera is trained on leafy shrubbery blowing in the breeze. No soundtracks intervene on the pictures.

A pair of flat-screen monitors zooms into the greenery, bobbing amid the glinting sunlight, while bright blue sky establishes a flat background color. Closest to the camera, and thus out of focus, branches become hazy blurs of shifting color that interrupt the view.

Farther down the wall, a third monitor reverses the depth of field. Fingerlike leaves, tightly focused, hang down into the frame. Meanwhile, the background dissolves into a blustery swirl of blues, greens and flashes of gold.

In the triptych, nature's flux seems at once beautiful and ominous, familiar and alien, close at hand yet way out of reach. An unexpected poignancy envelops this unadorned work, which captures a sense of worldly estrangement as old as the book of Genesis.

By contrast, the second video, "five lobed and propagating," uses a kaleidoscopic lens to turn close-ups of lusciously colored flowers into devouring, sexualized maws. This beckoning mouth of hell is counterpoint to the paradise videos in the other room. Its hypnotic rhythms are underscored by a low-level soundtrack, pulsing like ambient sonar.

Five stills from the flower video are mounted nearby on acrylic sheets, but they lack the clarity and visual ferociousness of the DVD. A large sculpture, which translates the undulations of a topographical map into an environment built from corrugated cardboard, wraps around the walls of the larger gallery. Its stepped form alludes to bleachers, where spectators might take in the show. But finally it's too inert an object to function as more than an environmental footnote. The real action is on screen, in what might be called videos for airport waiting rooms.