It's Just A Matter Of Time

And I think we know what this could refer to at this point in history...

David Zwirner Gallery and the Félix González-Torres Foundation present a timely and purposeful remounting of the celebrated conceptual artist's 1992 piece:

“Untitled” (It’s Just a Matter of Time) (1992) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres is currently installed in various locations along the Hudson River in New York as part of Sky High Farm’s inaugural biennial, TREES NEVER END AND HOUSES NEVER END, through October 2025.

“It’s Just a Matter of Time,” a simple yet evocative phrase, appears on standard billboards in white Gothic typeface on a black background, disrupting the typical flow of commercial information. When the work was first installed in 1992 in Hamburg, the text was written in German: Es ist nur eine Frage der Zeit. The work is ideally installed in 24 outdoor billboard locations, and must be installed in a minimum of six locations. Gonzalez-Torres intended for the billboards to be situated in diverse locations and/or contexts in order to reach a broad cross-section of the general public.

Visit the link in bio to see a map of all billboards, which are installed as of August 1 at the following locations*:

Ravena, NY | US 9W, south of Old Ravena Rd.
Albany, NY | 18 Second Ave (Second Ave and Clinton St.)
East Greenbush, NY | NY 9J, 2500’ south of Hays Road
Troy, NY | King St., 200’ north of River St.
Troy, NY | 4th St., opposite Polk St.
Palenville, NY | Route 32, 100’ south of Route 32A

*Note that over the course of the exhibition, the billboard locations will shift.

https://www.felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org/
https://www.davidzwirner.com/

The Grace of the Sun

Grace of the Sun was a lighted installation by artist Robert Montgomery (previously here) shown at COP 26 in Glasgow, Scotland, 2021.

https://www.robertmontgomery.org/

Doing Nothing

https://www.instagram.com/douglascoupland/

Thought For 2022

A White (Ad-Free) Christmas

This last week, Canadian creative agency Wunder placed blank white ads on billboards, buses, bus stops and even print ads in Halifax, Nova Scotia in an effort to cut down on the visual and auditory noise of the season. Much appreciated, Wunder!

https://wunder.ca/

Just Sayin'...

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck...

More Poetry Is Needed

In honor of National Poetry Month 2018...we declare that more poetry is needed in this world.

Sign art by conceptual artist Jeremy Deller
http://www.jeremydeller.org

BEAUTY: Painting--Glen Rubsamen

Los Angeles artist Glen Rubsamen takes inspiration from a familiar site to most Californians: silhouetted palm trees and billboards at twilight. These images are fun, bold, graphic...with a touch of Ed Ruscha about them.

Top to bottom: Always The Optimist; Believe It If You Need It; Beynd Our Reach II; Beyond Our Reach; Cutting It Fine; Devereux; My Favorite Things; My Innermost Wish; Once And For All; The Machine In The Garden; The Night Shade; Visable [sic] From Space

http://glenrubsamen.com/index.html

"Your Space Or Mine" by Robert Montgomery

Last month, installation artist Robert Montgomery (previously here, here, here, and here) teamed with creative agency Jack to create a powerful installation called Your Space Or Mine. Here's Jack's press release for the event:

BILLBOARD POEMS IN EAST LONDON
SEPTEMBER 9 2017
We are delighted to have collaborated with Robert Montgomery this past weekend as part of our Your Space Or Mine project – an ongoing initiative providing a platform for artists and creatives on the street. This side project allows us to move away from the land of advertising every now and then, giving us the chance to flex our creative muscles by using our poster sites in unique and inspiring ways.

Montgomery has been called a vandal, a street artist, a post-situationist, a punk artist and the text-art Banksy. His work puts poetry in front of ordinary people in eye-catching visual formats, taking the written word to the most physical of spaces. The collaboration saw Montgomery takeover five of our major sites in East London, responding to these spaces by creating a series of poems using his signature style.

The poems were lyrical, dreamy and almost optimistic, covering the themes of modernism, racial and gender equality, immigration, love and hope, as well as strong statements against Donald Trump’s denial of climate change. Montgomery and urban explorer Niall McDevitt also lead an up close and personal walking tour of the Billboard Poems focusing on the poetry itself as well as the surrounding location.

“I started doing billboard works in Shoreditch in 2004 as my own protest against the Iraq War, and doing billboards in Shoreditch formed the backbone of my work throughout the 2000s. I no longer live in the neighbourhood, it’s too expensive for artists now, but being invited back by Jack is thrilling as I’m getting to take over whole streets where I used to live. It’s letting me work across multiple billboards and look at each street as a giant graphic poem and experiment much more with the visual aspects of the work. I’m thinking of them as concrete poems really with the billboard as the page and pushing the graphic elements more than I’ve been able to before.” – Robert Montgomery

http://www.robertmontgomery.org/
http://www.jackagency.co.uk/blog/rm/

BEAUTY: Installation--Jennifer Bolande

Here is one more conceptual installation at the current Desert X, an outdoor art exhibition through April 30, 2017. Artist Jennifer Bolande used the idea of advertising billboards--particularly the classic idea of the Burma shave ad, which is successive ads placed one after the other, fragments of an advertisement but which when seen consecutively, create a complete concept--to highlight not a product but the thing that the billboard obscures. The landscape. When lined up just right, each billboard acts almost as a window...

http://jbolande.com/