Corrina Espinosa "Rerun: A Western Temporal Paradox"

“Rerun, a Western temporal paradox, is a part of an ongoing series called Reverie at the Precipice. It's about a place where reality feels staged, hypnotic, unstable. Dare I say, simulated? I use the television a lot in my work as both a portal and a prison. It's nostalgia, comfort, propaganda, entertainment, identity, escapism, and collective hallucination all at once.

Here, the fictional characters physically climb out of the television set, breaking the 4th wall and collapsing the boundary between mediated fiction and lived reality. The television no longer simply broadcast narratives, it releases them into the world around us. The imagery intentionally reverses traditional Western archetypes and power structures. The woman emerges as the central heroic figure. Well, the cowboy appears to be the vulnerable one and the one in need of rescue. It becomes a subtle role reversal for contemporary times, questioning inherited myths surrounding masculinity, heroism, and cultural identity. The piece is also interactive.

Viewers can press a button to cycle through different television channels, activating layered audio remixes that blend fragments of vintage cartoons, Westerns, advertisements, educational, physic films, and recordings from figures like Carl Sagan. Familiar nostalgia collides with scientific explorations of reality, perception, space, time, and existence itself. The shifting audio landscape transforms the work into an unstable broadcast environment, where entertainment, philosophy, propaganda, and cosmic wonder begin to blur together. The distorted glitches running through the figures suggest instability within the signal itself. These characters are simultaneously materializing and disintegrating, caught between fiction, memory, and technological decay. This is about the strange contradiction that is contemporary American life. That feeling, that everything around us is collapsing, socially, politically, environmentally, spiritually, and yet we continue performing normalcy, performing it through screens.

The television becomes a symbol for that performance, a glowing altar we willingly carry with us. At the same time, I genuinely love the visual language of old television culture. There's affection in the work too. Vintage broadcasts, westerns, advertisements, sitcoms, and late night static all shaped my imagination. The cowboy lives in tension between critique and seduction, sincerity and simulation, asking whether we are consuming the signal or whether the signal is consuming us.”