Opportunity Knocks, Brad Tucker’s solo exhibition at Art Palace, suggests that a carefully placed joke explains more about the nature of reality than a seemingly objective fact. Tucker’s show consists of two ambitious language-based projects—a three-channel video installation and an in-progress linoleum print book—as well as a series of wooden sculptural objects. His colorful sculptures, works like Get Around Town (2007), a piece that resembles an upside-down bicycle, set a playful tone in the gallery. The two language-based projects that constitute the majority of the exhibition employ a similar playfulness. Through wordplay—a comedic embrace of the literal—Tucker’s video installation and in-progress book subvert the ways that language creates meaning.

Tucker’s three-channel video installation, The Secret of Life and Death (2007), features videos of Tucker singing a text written by artist Allen Ruppersberg for an exhibition catalogue. The videos are installed within a hodgepodge arrangement of popish, thrift store, minimalist paintings that create a screen-like false wall. Beyond the screen, a tangle of DVD players, wires and coaxial adapters is visible. Tucker cordons off this mess of equipment behind a sculpture of an expanding gate. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” he seems to say, a statement which ultimately draws our attention towards the jumble behind the screen.

When the three videos of The Secret of Life and Death play together, each of the multiple Tuckers completes one portion of a string of statements or sentences. The videos evoke the confusing feeling of talking into a cell phone while it’s producing an echo. In a strategy akin to the projections of Tracy + the Plastics, Tucker occasionally appears behind himself in the videos playing various instruments. Somehow, the various Tuckers manage to cooperate and produce a sincere but clumsy song. The work is also reminiscent of John Baldessari Sings Sol LeWitt (1972), a video in which Baldessari sings statements about conceptual art by Sol LeWitt. Like Baldessari, Tucker sings the words of another artist—off kilter; like Baldessari’s, Tucker's manner is simultaneously respectful and skeptical. Dry, awkward truthfulness characterizes the videos by both artists.

As part of his other large-scale project at Art Palace, Try All (2007), Tucker has set up one of the galleries as a drying room for linoleum prints that will become part of a book. The prints hang like laundry on a wire while various sculptures of tools are scattered around the room, each exhibiting just enough of Tucker’s Oldenburg-like shift to peak interest. Try All exemplifies Tucker’s interest in wordplay. Each page is made up of a group of drawn images. When “read” in combination, each series of images produces a word or phrase used in the practice of law. For example, the title, Try All, sounds like trial. Tucker uses this exchange between images and words to manipulate language for the sake of confusion and humor. The pages of Try All, like the rest of the exhibition, are as charming to look at as they are to think about.

Josh Rios is a working artist, student of art history and co-founder of Okay Mountain gallery.