Today from our partners at Art Practical, we bring you Sarah Burke’s review of Tapping the Mirror at Royal NoneSuch Gallery in Oakland, California. The author notes, “As the fragments [of the video] continuously flicker into each other, [it] becomes less about the worlds imagined, and more about the modes by which we collectively imagine them.” This article was originally published on August 6, 2015.

Brynda Glazier and Courtney Johnson. Tapping the Mirror, 2015. Installation view. Courtesy of the Artists and Royal Nonesuch Gallery, Oakland. Photo: Courtney Johnson.

The curatorial statement for Tapping the Mirror, featuring works by sculptor Brynda Glazier and painter Courtney Johnson, is prefaced with a fitting quote from the late French theorist Jean Baudrillard: “There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room … it is as if another planet is communicating with you.” Tapping the Mirror, which is currently on view at Royal Nonesuch Gallery, is indeed reminiscent of a portal to another planet of sorts—an alternate world at once foreign and familiar.

The show centers around Negative Joy, a two-channel video installation projected onto one of the gallery’s walls. The projection is a 20-minute collage of footage culled from television shows, movies, music videos, and other visual pop-culture artifacts, most of which look to be from the ’70s and ’80s. Each clip is short, only about ten to twenty seconds long, but when recontextualized and edited together by Glazier and Johnson, they produce a cohesive flow. By virtue of being presented together, the clips—whether of a woman lighting a cigarette with a gun-shaped lighter, horror-movie mutants, or dancing space women—are dislodged from their original narratives. These aesthetic fragments take on new meanings and present a skewed but recognizable reflection of popular culture.

Read the full article here.