Non-Sign II is a site-specific installation and constructed advertising opportunity that is guaranteed, as such, to stagnate. Not a billboard but a reference to one, the work makes comment by making no comment at all. Steel rods arranged with space between leave a translucent structure that while structurally sound, appears as if it could be blown apart by a gust of wind. This false sense of ephemerality reverses the standard relationship between the form and function of a billboard, wherein the form remains permanent but its contents are always temporary. Non-Sign II advertises nothing but the Washington sky on the border between the United States and Canada – which is, perhaps, the thinking behind the USA government’s commission of the work. The project looks and acts like a billboard, supporting the position that, if not a billboard, Non-Sign II is an inverse. It is the negative to a positive, attested by the rendering of negative and positive space. There is really nothing to see here. We are offered space to think, without the over-bearing company of something to think about. In what it lacks, Non-Sign II is a subliminal act of resistance against the advertising industry and consumer culture, manipulating the negative to re-generate a positive. The ongoing push and pull between positive and negative, and associated satisfaction and dissatisfaction for the viewer, pushes the content of Non-Sign II beyond the piece of sky it so poetically frames. What could be described as an approachable complexity underlying the presentation of Non-Sign II, is reiterated in Maryhill Double . 2 The installation is a model of the Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington State, duplicating in scale the volume of the museum. Made of scaffolding and construction netting, Maryhill Double initially appears to be a building site on a stretch of grassland in Oregon—however, there is no promise to build. The installation, much like Non-Sign I I , is a cancellation. The project strips power from the institution to which it refers, indirectly posing questions about the function of the museum as well as the authority it grants itself. Without its original contents, and no longer a trading post for cultural currency, the Maryhill Museum is only an architectural structure. There is an irony to reframing a museum as a work-in-progress because the museum, traditionally, has been a place where progress halts, time stops, and where nothing is valued more than those objects which have already demonstrated a lasting and permanent impact. Maryhill Double , by contrast, denotes impermanence. Here, again, meaning resides in its absence. Participants in the Maryhill Double project are offered the option to physically engage the building in their visit as they navigate the installation from the inside. By operating as a public space in addition to formally duplicating the original, the project initiates a dialogue with its counterpart located across the Columbia River Gorge. Each building works to publicly address art-historical precedents, the difference being that the Maryhill Museum of Art stands for these precedents, and Maryhill Double , against.
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lead pencil studio
above: Lead Pencil Studio, Non-Sign II , 2010, near Blaine, Washington. Funded by the Art in Architecture program of the US government. facing page: Lead Pencil Studio, Maryhill Doubl e, 2006, sited in Oregon, just across the border from Maryhill, Washington and overlooking the Columbia River Gorge.
2 Maryhill Double was realised in 2006 as a temporary installation. It stood for three months and has since been taken down.
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