viii.

SIGNS OF CHANGE

HOW DOES THE DECAY OF SIGNS CHANGE THEIR MEANING?

Signs of Change is a visual index of deteriorating signs found on the streets of Manhattan during the summer of 2023.

New York is full of signs: neon advertisements, paper flyers, vinyl placards, the works of a sign painter. An eclectic collage of human communication manufactured to inform or persuade.But just like the people who make them, these signs grow and decay. Neon lights burn out, a poster tears, the vinyl is scratched, and new marks cover a painted sign. Each small modification accumulates, slowly changing these artifacts’ identities as they slowly flow into visual oblivion; then trashed and replaced by a successor. The cycle starts again.

Susceptible to changing weather, graffiti artists, and the continual layering of other competing graphics in this highly trafficked area, these artifacts are a dynamic source of this process of sign decay. At each stage of their withering, letters degrade into lines, logos warp and shift, and imagery bends into strange accidental arrangements.

These artifacts are visually shaped to communicate specific intentions. But as their forms change, how does its communication and what they convey? What new meanings can be generated by this attrition before their demise? And how does this breathing cycle of our manmade products represent the liminal nature of the manufactured refuse we leave behind?