Visual Art CoCA Annual Christine Gatti’s life flashes before your eyes in her 34-minute still-montage video “:18 Project,” one of the most compelling entries in COCA’s 2006 Annual show. For 18 months, Gatti filmed her face and her surroundings on the 18th minute of the hour every day. You see her asleep with her partner, at a bar, with kids, in the kitchen, watching the news on TV. With a buzzing soundtrack interspersed with sprinklings of sad piano notes and ubiquitous modern sounds like answering machine messages, this kinetic and elegiac portrait is an intimate and truthful depiction of the poetic overlaps and unordinariness of ordinary life. The show was juried by Jennifer Gately, Portland Art Museum’s new curator of Northwest art, who selected from over 400 entries nationwide. As with most exhibits of this nature, there’s a range of quality, depth, and style—photography, video, sculpture, and mixed media—but enough standout pieces like Gatti’s to make it worth a look. Local artist Robert Yoder may have won the juror’s prize for his three rather subtle paper and vinyl abstract collages, but Portland artist Sean Healy deserves the jester’s prize for his mischievous portrait of Melvil Dewey (inventor of the Dewey Decimal System) in painted and resin-coated bits of chewed-up chewing gum stuck, of course, to the underside of a table. Some work provokes more profound questions than others: Jennie Thwang appears to have filmed herself falling apart on two screens, laughing, belching, twitching, on the verge of sobs, while Alicia Eggert’s clump of clothing and shoes hanging on the wall, titled All My Clothes, is part of her study of identity and ownership—but primarily raises the question, then what the heck is she wearing right now? Center on Contemporary Art, 410 Dexter Ave. N., 206-728-1980, www.cocaseattle.org. Noon–5 p.m. Wed.–Sun. Through Dec. 30. SUE PETERS