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Artist Exhibitions:
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Artist Reviews:
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Artist Statement for The Open Sign Project
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The OPEN sign project, SEND ME A SIGN
Homogenizing America through the distribution of functional Icons
In 2005 the OPEN sign project started in a small town in Northwestern Montana
In 2005 the OPEN sign project started in a small town in Northwestern Montana
I moved to a small community in Northwest Montana about 10 years ago where I became the Director of the local Art Museum located in downtown Kalispell, Montana. This was at a time of franchise infancy in the community. Wal-Mart and Costco had arrived just after the first McDonalds. Before that the infrastructure of the Flathead Valley was local Mom and Pop un-franchised businesses. The Flathead Valley of Northwest Montana was mostly untouched by the mass distribution of corporate enterprises that dominated the larger communities of America. It's sense of place was that small Home Town, that Rural Paradise that offered a haven from the large urban communities of modern America; a place where a kid can grab a towel and walk to the end of the street to the community swimming pool with no worries. Ten years after the explosion of Franchise Businesses I can hardly recognize the community I moved to in 1996. The valley has taken on the same visual characteristics as the rest of America; it has become part of the Homogenation! Every exit ramp across America, (we still don’t have any exit ramps, but they are coming) reveals the same architecture as does every Home Depot, Lowe’s or any other major anchor complex. You've seen one; you've seen 'em all. This is how goods and services are delivered today; the Architecture is functional and predictable, a box with ornamentation stuck on it giving each box an identifiable appearance, or as I like to think of it, a CODE. One step further inside the box and we identify the product line. It really doesn’t matter what McDonalds you walk into anywhere on the planet, you know you can get a Big Mac and you identify the product with the architectural Code. This is the reinforcement of the Code-- an image of the corporation, the franchise. This is where I started; this is what I thought my project was to be about-- the 'Sameness' of the landscape. As a reformed Minimalist, this might have worked out well. All I needed to do was take one picture of any one of these boxes and my project would be done, they are all the same. Oh, I guess you could pan out and get different landscapes, travel to each Home Depot location and look for what was unique to it's placement in relation to the location, but every store looks like every other store, from L.A. to N.Y C.
BUT, I noticed something in my community that was a direct result of this kind of mass distribution and coding-- it is the OPEN sign. Our local Costco Wholesale Warehouse carries these signs as does Sam’s Club. We don’t have a Sam’s Club, but it is coming soon. What these signs do is tie or link the most diversified group of businesses together, like a brightly colored thread woven throughout a tapestry. The signs use an established and functional Code, "OPEN" for business. They shine brightly throughout my community. In the space of a couple hours I took dozens of different photographs of signs in an incredibly diverse selection of businesses that only have the sign in common. Once you start looking you will see that these simple, functional signs dot the Urban Landscape like dandelions in a well manicured yard.
This project is about the documentation of these OPEN signs in the Global Urban Landscape.
The scope and magnitude of the project is yet unknown and beyond the ability of one person to document because of it's enormous size and location.
You can contribute! Just follow the link to submit a sign.
www.opensignproject.com
David Eubank
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