White Signs

The series White Signs resulted from travels in the American Southwest from 2009 to 2016. It began while speeding by a giant superhighway sign that was meaningless, painted white, pointing to nothing. Originally this body of work focused exclusively white signs but has since evolved to include any sign whose original purpose is gone or obscure: in other words signifiers whose meaning has been erased. They are signs which have lost their object: the signified. the business they point to, their purpose for being, is defunct, lost to history.

These images examine the challenge of understanding things that border a highway, which typically occurs from a car moving at high speed. Because the view isn’t stationary the signs aren’t seen from either a single perspective or multiple stationary perspectives. Rather, they’re experienced like a film, in a blur that’s usually peripheral to the main focus of vision.

My desire is to explore the elements of time, the erasure of history and the act of seeing. A road is a slice through a landscape, designed to facilitate travel from Point A to B in the shortest time possible. The white signs are historical markers that time has passed by and no longer point to anything. They’ve become artifacts that, if noticed at all, are viewed nostalgically, historically, as objects displaying the ravages of time, with rusting substructures, peeling paint, etc.  Apparently blank, they are palimpsests of the automobile age in America.

All images digital collage/archival pigment prints, various sizes, up to 60” high.