Joshua Space Steps Through the Mirror with Mickey & Friends

In 1936, Walt Disney released a short animation called Thru the Mirror, where Mickey Mouse steps through a looking glass into a fantastical world where playing cards dance, furniture comes alive, and reality’s rules are turned upside down. Disney once described such scenes as “the plausible impossible”—making the audience believe in something that couldn’t possibly happen in reality but feels right within a universe where imagination is king.

Nearly nine decades later, this concept resonated deeply with Melbourne artist Joshua Space when Disney approached him about creating a new exhibition celebrating Mickey & Friends. Space, an artist and designer who has built his reputation working with reflective surfaces and distorted mirrors that create the illusion of alternate dimensions, immediately recognised the perfect synchronicity.

“I remembered something about Mickey going through a mirror, and obviously it made sense since mirrors are what I work with,” he explains. “When this opportunity came up, I went looking for ’Mickey in the mirror’ and found it was called Thru the Mirror. I was like, ‘This is too perfect.’”

For the exhibition, Space has assembled a collaborative team including photographer-director Georgia Haynes and artist-fashion designer DOCG to create a modern interpretation of Mickey’s mirror world. Named after the 1936 animation, the exhibition opens with a VIP event this Thursday evening and is open to the public on Friday 4 April and Saturday 5 April.

Part of the House of Mouse global event series, the exhibition represents a full-circle moment where Disney’s heritage of imaginative storytelling meets contemporary artistic vision. Throughout the space, Mickey and his friends’ unmistakable silhouettes appear in Space’s signature “void mirrors” as well as floor installations and abstract paintings, with every artwork inviting visitors to see themselves within Mickey’s world of endless possibility.

The centrepiece is ‘Thru Space’—a large-scale, mirror-finished sculpture of Mickey’s iconic gloved hands breaking through a wall, frozen in the moment of dimensional transition. “When you step into the exhibition, you’re now in this dream state,” Space says. “You’ve stepped through the mirror and you’re in an environment where we can let loose our wild ideas, free our imagination or unleash our unique way of viewing the world—which really captures what Mickey has always been about.”

Diving into this magic portal, we caught up with Space as he and his friends began to install the Thru the Mirror exhibition.

You’re an artist and designer, and lately your sculptural work has centred on reflection and perspective. How did this align with Mickey’s world? 

I’m fascinated by how we perceive the world around us and how we engage with both ourselves and our environments. That’s what’s taken me down the path of working with reflective surfaces and sculptural pieces. In most of my art practice, I’m exploring how to bring something into a space that allows people to look at things differently—much like reflections in a still body of water, revealing refractions of light from different angles.

With Mickey and this exhibition, it’s all about encouraging people to perceive things in ways that aren’t just what’s in front of them. The Disney universe has always been about that kind of imagination—seeing beyond the ordinary into something magical.

How does the world of Mickey & Friends connect with your aesthetic approach? 

My work has this clean, minimalistic aesthetic where I strip things back to convey a point or feeling. My void mirror works have this warped rippling edge texture, where it’s hard to see where the reflective surface begins or ends—it’s like a black hole, or a passage into another space or another reality. I’ve always been fascinated by that kind of dimensional shift which plays into the concept of looking at things differently, literally and metaphorically.

When you look at what Disney has been doing since the 1930s, especially with Thru the Mirror and Fantasia, it’s those magical alternate realities with twisted, warped perspectives. Mickey’s adventures encourage you to embrace curiosity, which perfectly aligns with what I try to create in my reflective works—I want them to be portals into different ways of seeing.

Where do you gather creative inspiration from?

It’s really mixed. Previously, it came from the environment around me. During my last shows, I was living in Torquay [on Victoria’s surf coast] so it was a lot of the natural environment and space. I also get a lot of inspiration from thinking and reading about the universe. I love digging into science-based thinking and research about how our perception works and how we interact with the world.

For this exhibition, it’s been very much about exploring the Mickey archives. When Disney approached us, I remembered seeing this animated short called Thru the Mirror, which is the title of the show. It’s a 1936 short film where Mickey falls asleep reading Alice Through the Looking Glass and then enters a magical dream world. I wanted to highlight these elements to open up thinking about what Walt Disney and Mickey were really about.

How did you bring together the collaborative team for this exhibition?

For this project, it made sense to work with friends. Mickey is always shown with his friends in these stories, so I wanted to bring in my early creative crew. Georgia Haynes and DOCG are both incredibly talented artists I’ve known since opening my concept store Spacebound years ago. Georgia is this brilliant photographer and director, while DOCG is a multidisciplinary creator with this instantly recognisable cartoon-esque painting style and his signature ‘DOCG eyes’ symbol. We all met through the store, working in fashion and textiles together, and have supported each other ever since. 

Tell us about the exhibition’s elements and how they interpret Mickey’s universe.
Georgia and I created a large floor piece, 7 x 4 metres, incorporating her photography that visitors walk across—it has a colourful, motion-based feel that creates a grid of Mickey-inspired iconography. DOCG’s paintings combine recognisable Mickey & Friends silhouettes with his DOCG eyes in an abstract style—it’s equal parts Disney and DOCG.

My reflective works create the connective tissue by reflecting and distorting everything in the space. The centrepiece is “Thru Space”—it’s something new for me, a three-dimensional sculpture in polished, highly reflective steel. It shows Mickey’s hands pushing through a mirror, mounted as if breaking through the wall into our reality. The hands are quite large, the pair spanning about a metre across.

The concept is that visitors are already inside the dream space or inside the mirror—the dreamlike world Mickey entered in the animation. The reflective pieces create image shifts where you see Georgia’s floor work and DOCG’s paintings reflected, while visitors become part of the artwork too, seeing themselves amid these Disney-inspired elements from unexpected angles.

How did your childhood experiences with Disney influence this project?
As a kid, I was encouraged to follow wacky ideas and create freely, which absolutely connects to that Disney spirit. You see it in Walt’s philosophy too—this idea that “all dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.”

I remember Disney always being on TV as a kid—these glimpses of story segments. The Mickey cartoons were always my favourites, particularly the older ones that ventured into trippy or lucid spaces. Especially Fantasia, which we also reference in one of the exhibition’s silhouettes, and Thru the Mirror—they’re a little off-centre, these adventures where Mickey is encouraged to explore beyond boundaries.It’s easy to forget how much Disney—for me personally, and I know for Georgia and DOCG as well—was the starting point for creativity. As a kid you’re drawing the shapes—the silhouettes of Mickey are so iconic and recognisable—and you see so many of those early stories and iconography, like Mickey’s hands, come through into other artists, other cartoons that have indirectly influenced you over time. Disney has influenced entire generations of artists. 

What’s the feeling you want visitors to take away from the exhibition? 
Mickey & Friends has this distinct feeling—it’s fun but often carries deeper meaning. Walt was an artist and creator first, and we’ve approached this exhibition with that same spirit. The show isn’t just about putting a mouse on the wall, it’s about creating an experience.

When you enter this space, you immediately feel that sense of fun and exploration that Disney has always championed. As you move through, you’re connecting with DOCG’s artistic vision, walking across Georgia’s photographic perspective, and seeing everything—including yourself—reflected and transformed through my void mirrors.

It’s really about that personal adventure and connection—finding your own perfect angle or perspective. That embodies my interpretation of the Disney ethos: “Imagination has no age, and dreams are forever.” Mickey has been doing that since 1928, and in this exhibition, we’re continuing that tradition of imaginative possibility.

Catch Thru the Mirror at 19–21 Johnston Street, Collingwood, April 4–5, 11am–5pm each day.