The Daily Mirror

Richard Sides’ work is medium non-specific and often explores improvisation. Some recurring techniques include video works, expansive collage techniques, and inhabitable environments and structures. Media images and other found objects are used by Sides in these processes, borrowing from the initial application of images and commodity worlds; often simply presented to the viewer unmediated. Here, the spectators find themselves in a process of trying to make sense of things, images, or arrangements, questioning their authenticity and confronting the proposed usage. At other points, Sides’ arrangements condense into clear statements, utilizing pop cultural references and observations on political reality, including film quotes and elements of meme culture.

The Daily Mirror, both the name of a British tabloid and the title of Richard Sides’ video installation, not only connects to our everyday media environment but also combines the documentation of our existence with personal narratives of fates, passions, and desires. The basic structure of the video work is a seemingly never-ending sequence of street views drifting by like the view from an imaginary window, interlinking various scenes such as languorous landscape shots and seemingly aimless table conversations in which the viewers can participate unnoticed. Richard Sides collages these often loosely staged shots in such a way that their musically improvised rhythm paints the picture of an unsettled present. In the at times confrontational and at times conciliatory negotiation between an inside and an outside, a private state of being and public participation, The Daily Mirror thus questions the boundary between the I that interprets and the Other that communicates.