Headlines & Last Lines in the Movies transforms the façade of the Contemporary Art Gallery, wooden cladding covering its frontage and south east corner. Resembling a construction site, the structure becomes the ground for the work; the title a precise description of itself.

In this new mural, Brüggemann wrote headlines from current newspapers, from local to global, in combination with excerpts of last lines from popular films. “Forget it Jake, its Chinatown” could be spray-painted next to “Enbridge Pipeline Rejected”, the juxtaposition of appropriated texts creating both a familiarity and an oddly appropriate pairing suggestive of narratives that may exist to connect current news items with scripted dialogue.  With one text residing in the real, the other in the fictive, in combination they create a barrage of information that Brüggemann unifies into a totality of black text. The overlay forms a graphic field that is only partly legible, language creating an immersive installation that draws colloquial phrases into dense cacophonic arenas. The work seems declaratory, but what it is trying to communicate is drowned out by volume, intensity and opacity.

It is important that Brüggemann makes installations by hand, the time taken to transcribe them becoming a form of personalization, the act of writing as a means to externalize thought. The frenetic appearance might suggest the scrambled notes of someone trying to work through a complex problem or evoke the direct action of a graffiti political protest, the fragmented scribbling formally read as statements that urgently need to be expressed.

Despite the stylistic uniformity, phrases still register as individual fragments with multiple subjects. There is no cohesive meaning beyond the possible realization that a sentence came from either a film or the reporting of current affairs, but the sources, headlines and last lines, both function as summaries. A good headline gives a concise description of what’s in the subsequent article; it captures the reader’s attention, encouraging them to continue reading or more opportunistically to purchase the newspaper. And the last line of a movie can encapsulate what came before it, distilling the narrative into a single line.

“I get to live the rest of my life as a schnook” is a funny and ironic recap of the film Goodfellas, but does it still function when dislocated from its original context? Both headlines and last lines notionally represent a greater whole, yet Brüggemann disorientates us, his production rendering text that is almost unreadable, questioning the way we encounter information through language. Individual phrases leap out to command our attention as we attempt to read and decipher words, yet the mural is at once like a protest, the many voices of the body politic, conflicting and cancelling each other, just so many things vying for our attention.