The Billboard Project
Robert Kleyn and Manuel Piña
HOW TO LIVE UNTIL THE WATER IS OVER YOUR HEAD
Billboard at E 1st Avenue and Clark Avenue, Vancouver, BC.
Presented by: Denis Walz
When Monica first asked me to be part of her pandemic-year billboard project, the structure rising from the parking lot right behind the gallery was really like an extension of the gallery itself, like an exterior gallery wall. Once that location was out of the picture and we settled on the 'trivision' board at E1 St and Clark, that connection vanished leaving no support from any immediate artistic context.
Freed of that association, the billboard project offered a new chance to think about strategies of public address, also a primary concern of my architectural work. While in architecture this is usually a matter of typology and style, the impact of the billboard relies on the fertile relationship between text and image, between the different forms of communication they can encode. The visual use of text has long been a part of my work, starting with the slide sequence projections of the early 1970’s, continuing with the found text assemblages included in the Naufragio show at the Monica Reyes Gallery in 2017, and with the series of posters responding to the covid pandemic shown in the gallery's storefront window while the city was in lock-down, not to mention the recent book, 'Page 10' which treats entire pages of text as image.
Advertising has long been a part of art’s territory, but it was conceptualism and the political aspirations of appropriation art in the 1970s that initiated the practice of artists working with the billboard as a medium in its own right, and one that is inherently political because of its reliance on its siting in the public realm. In recent years it’s become ever more apparent that true public life rests on the freedom to ask real questions, and for me the only question of the moment is fundamentally political – How to live? (I could equally have asked, What to do? as the two are inseparable, as they where for the poet Wallace Stevens who used the couple as a title.) In a sense, the question embodies its own answer – always be asking questions! Within the image-text dialectic of a billboard, the image and the text interrogate each other.
To reinforce this dynamic, I asked Manuel Pina, one of the artists in the Naufragio show, and known for his views of the ocean, to collaborate on this billboard. The image he proposed creates a perspective of four horizons plunging from the corners toward the centre. The crystalline structure of Manuel's photo construction, reminiscent of the early sculptures of Robert Smithson, creates a vanishing point over which float the bold and simple lettering of my text, HOW TO LIVE UNTIL THE WATER IS OVER YOUR HEAD. The artificial spatiality of the image and the imagistic quality of the grotesque font emphasize the visual, logo-like character of the words. The whole composition aspires to be, not a work of art, but just a billboard. Long seen as a negative thing, the billboard has been both symbol and example of the urban 'blight' that so obsessed twentieth-century urban planners and other interested observers of public space, so portrayed by Charles Olson in his Maxiumus Poems:
But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
Our billboard does not aim to parody or subvert artistic strategies that have been co-opted wholesale by advertising, but instead wishes to provoke and enlarge upon the nature of the question of what it means to make a public statement in the first place. From this perspective we can see the billboard as a tableau, its frame a proscenium: even the catwalk along the front used by the workers to install the giant poster, is a sort of stunted stage from which to declaim, like the vestigial stage in the movie theatre, only used to make a public announcement to the audience as it awaits the main event.
Robert Kleyn, Sept. 2020
Freed of that association, the billboard project offered a new chance to think about strategies of public address, also a primary concern of my architectural work. While in architecture this is usually a matter of typology and style, the impact of the billboard relies on the fertile relationship between text and image, between the different forms of communication they can encode. The visual use of text has long been a part of my work, starting with the slide sequence projections of the early 1970’s, continuing with the found text assemblages included in the Naufragio show at the Monica Reyes Gallery in 2017, and with the series of posters responding to the covid pandemic shown in the gallery's storefront window while the city was in lock-down, not to mention the recent book, 'Page 10' which treats entire pages of text as image.
Advertising has long been a part of art’s territory, but it was conceptualism and the political aspirations of appropriation art in the 1970s that initiated the practice of artists working with the billboard as a medium in its own right, and one that is inherently political because of its reliance on its siting in the public realm. In recent years it’s become ever more apparent that true public life rests on the freedom to ask real questions, and for me the only question of the moment is fundamentally political – How to live? (I could equally have asked, What to do? as the two are inseparable, as they where for the poet Wallace Stevens who used the couple as a title.) In a sense, the question embodies its own answer – always be asking questions! Within the image-text dialectic of a billboard, the image and the text interrogate each other.
To reinforce this dynamic, I asked Manuel Pina, one of the artists in the Naufragio show, and known for his views of the ocean, to collaborate on this billboard. The image he proposed creates a perspective of four horizons plunging from the corners toward the centre. The crystalline structure of Manuel's photo construction, reminiscent of the early sculptures of Robert Smithson, creates a vanishing point over which float the bold and simple lettering of my text, HOW TO LIVE UNTIL THE WATER IS OVER YOUR HEAD. The artificial spatiality of the image and the imagistic quality of the grotesque font emphasize the visual, logo-like character of the words. The whole composition aspires to be, not a work of art, but just a billboard. Long seen as a negative thing, the billboard has been both symbol and example of the urban 'blight' that so obsessed twentieth-century urban planners and other interested observers of public space, so portrayed by Charles Olson in his Maxiumus Poems:
But that which matters, that which insists, that which will last,
that! o my people, where shall you find it, how, where, where shall you listen
when all is become billboards, when, all, even silence, is spray-gunned?
Our billboard does not aim to parody or subvert artistic strategies that have been co-opted wholesale by advertising, but instead wishes to provoke and enlarge upon the nature of the question of what it means to make a public statement in the first place. From this perspective we can see the billboard as a tableau, its frame a proscenium: even the catwalk along the front used by the workers to install the giant poster, is a sort of stunted stage from which to declaim, like the vestigial stage in the movie theatre, only used to make a public announcement to the audience as it awaits the main event.
Robert Kleyn, Sept. 2020
Location
Kathy Slade
Wherever you go, you will be a city.
Billboard at Princess and East Hastings Streets, Vancouver, BC.
June 27 - July 30, 2020
Mónica Reyes Gallery is pleased to present Wherever you go, you will be a city., a billboard project by Kathy Slade. The billboard depicts a bright blue sky with fluffy clouds that are partially framed by various shades from the green foliage of treetops. While Slade’s billboard is site-specific, the image it depicts could be from anywhere in the city, a suburb, or the countryside. It is a cinematic-like scene that suggests daydreaming, of looking up at the sky on a summer’s day.
The sentence “Wherever you go, you will be a city” is presented like a subtitle for an English translation of a foreign film. While not from a film, the text here is a translation that stems from Hannah Arendt’s reading of Thucydides and the Classical Greek idea of πόλις, the polis. In The Human Condition (1958) Arendt writes, “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people acting and living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” Arendt’s hope is to return to this older notion of the polis not as a traditionalist but to critically re-present this idea from the past for the sake of a better future.
Kathy Slade works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade has upcoming solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany (2020), The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2022), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge (2022). Her recent solo exhibitions include: A Dream and a Drive (with Amber Frid-Jimenez), Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2019); This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018); I WANT IT ALL I WANT IT NOW, Walter C. Koerner Library, Vancouver (2018); and Blue Monday, 4COSE, London, UK (2017). Slade’s work has been included in group exhibitions such as: It’s Never Too Late to Speculate; Fluc, Vienna, AU (2019); Uses of History, studio e, Seattle, WA (2019); The Ashtray Show West, Belmacz Gallery, London, UK (2018); and Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery Vancouver, BC (2018). Slade teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and is a doctoral student at the European Graduate School.
The Billboard Project extends the public’s access to local artists and treats viewers to approachable, yet thought-provoking contemporary art on the billboard adjacent to the Mónica Reyes Gallery on Princess Avenue just south of East Hastings Street in the historic and diverse neighbourhood of Strathcona.
The sentence “Wherever you go, you will be a city” is presented like a subtitle for an English translation of a foreign film. While not from a film, the text here is a translation that stems from Hannah Arendt’s reading of Thucydides and the Classical Greek idea of πόλις, the polis. In The Human Condition (1958) Arendt writes, “The polis, properly speaking, is not the city-state in its physical location; it is the organization of the people as it arises out of acting and speaking together, and its true space lies between people acting and living together for this purpose, no matter where they happen to be.” Arendt’s hope is to return to this older notion of the polis not as a traditionalist but to critically re-present this idea from the past for the sake of a better future.
Kathy Slade works across mediums and has produced textile works, prints, sculpture, film, video, performance, music projects, and publications. Slade has upcoming solo exhibitions at Kunstverein Braunschweig in Germany (2020), The Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (2022), and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge (2022). Her recent solo exhibitions include: A Dream and a Drive (with Amber Frid-Jimenez), Monica Reyes Gallery, Vancouver, BC (2019); This is a Chord. This is Another., Surrey Art Gallery (2018); I WANT IT ALL I WANT IT NOW, Walter C. Koerner Library, Vancouver (2018); and Blue Monday, 4COSE, London, UK (2017). Slade’s work has been included in group exhibitions such as: It’s Never Too Late to Speculate; Fluc, Vienna, AU (2019); Uses of History, studio e, Seattle, WA (2019); The Ashtray Show West, Belmacz Gallery, London, UK (2018); and Beginning with the Seventies: GLUT, Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery Vancouver, BC (2018). Slade teaches in the School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University and is a doctoral student at the European Graduate School.
The Billboard Project extends the public’s access to local artists and treats viewers to approachable, yet thought-provoking contemporary art on the billboard adjacent to the Mónica Reyes Gallery on Princess Avenue just south of East Hastings Street in the historic and diverse neighbourhood of Strathcona.
