ABOUT reSee
The prefix 're' is an encouragement to regard again, to reread the images and texts of the past. I am an artist whose work returns to the American highway billboard and combines the aesthetic values of design with environmental preservation and cultural recollection. Looking out the car window during the daily commute or long car trips across the country, we read billboards very quickly yet are left with only a brief impression. Using carefully worded and illustrated panels, billboards are deceptively simple, yet culturally saturated, images that are carefully placed to briefly distract our attention or entice us to visit the nearest road-side attraction.
But as soon as we read these signs, they are gone. The format and location
don't afford the opportunity for reflection, to appreciate the typography, to
see the grain of the image or the sharply rendered silkscreen.
By recycling printed over-run paper stock, my work is a return to the nuances
of the American highway billboard. A found-material from advertising
agencies, this otherwise unused paper would be another waste product
in our throw-away society. In cutting and slicing these sheets of paper, I
strive towards creating a shift of consciousness in the public's engagement
with the everyday. I think of my work as a means of relocating billboards
out of their roadside contexts and creating alternate readings that aren't
anchored to any original intent.
My refunctioning artistic practice uncovers layers of meaning whereby billboards find a new audience indoors. Directions and corporate logos that congest the quotidian landscape become colorful, affective syllables that struggle to communicate their commercial vocabularies. Parsed into smaller image pieces, the original roadside enticements and ads for highway travelers are recomposed and reconfigured so that the primary use and purpose of the billboard is not evident in the new design. The signs aren't so much read as they are felt. The highway billboard, as an American cultural mainstay, is reconfigured and now resounds with the historical linearity of visual cultures in new spaces of interaction: amidst grammar, cinema, and 'the frame'.