An Epitaph for Advertising?
Billboards have become inevitable city streets’ “residents”, but also prominent add-ons to roads and highways, bombarding drivers with various colorful messages often redirecting their attention from idyllic surrounding landscapes. Lead Pencil Studio, a Seattle-based art and architecture firm, created a billboard completely different from those we’re used to seeing. Namely, an installation consisting of a blank frame surrounded by a web of metal pieces recently emerged on the Canadian-US border. It’s composed of stainless steel thin black sticks which shape the billboard’s frame, the billboard itself actually framing “nothing”, i.e. nothing more than a clear view of the changing atmospheric conditions beyond. Despite this being a seemingly subtle spatial installation, the authors still manage to provocatively flirt with the serious issues plaguing today’s consumerist America, the world leader of trends in the advertising industry which is slowly but surely “eating away” at buildings, streets and cities. It could be said that this art project, commissioned by the American government within the framework of the GSA’s Design Excellence program, represents everything that today’s America doesn’t stand for.
Click here for Lead Pencil Studio’s other works.
photographs: Ian Gill courtesy of Lead Pencil Studio
