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I grew up making signs. Signs and signals. And what grew out of that activity to then become artwork was always already criticism as well about signs and signals.
Raised in Las Vegas, I spent the nights of an observational youth at its key energy facility – the Reid Gardner power plant – near Moapa, Nevada. This is the place that energized the city’s neon and sparked my interest in the literal powering of signs and symbols. Of course, signage of all kinds abounds in Las Vegas – signage that has itself profoundly conditioned so much of the “revaluation of values” for which that city is (in)famous.
Architect Robert Venturi had a deep and lingering effect on my thinking about signs and their power to condition value ethically, religiously, politically, etc. In graffiti art, street stenciling, and neon signage, there is the simple practice of placing a sign – usually one that is unauthorized – atop another sign, usually authorized. This same practice occurs both in black literature and biblical scripture (black signification and semiotics), both of which revalue the values of a dominant and historically oppressive symbolic order. And, so, this activity of placing a sign on top of another sign in order to examine the processes and products of the interchange between them is the basis of both my scholarship and artwork.
Though other sources also impact it, the latter is strongly continuous with the practical history of sign making:
From the earliest times it has been man’s practice to symbolize or “advertise” both the things and the ideas of the life about him. At first this manifestation of culture served as writing and printing; later…religious ideals became the objects for graphic expression. During the later Middle Ages, with the rise of economic organization, merchants and publicans commenced, under duress of competition, to hang out shingles showing representations which appealed strongly to the imagination, and with which they might be permanently identified. So arose guild names or trademarks, and signs.*
I teach religious studies at Pomona College.
*Weston Thomas, “What is a Sign?” Signs of the Times, 12. Qtd. in William Brevda, Signs of the Signs: The Literary Lights of Incandescence and Neon. Bucknell UP. 2011. P. ix.
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