Convey is a body of work I have been developing since 2008 which consists of photographs made in Mexico, Hong Kong, Germany, Great Britain, Spain, and the United States. It is a reflection on the omnipresent role of advertising text and imagery in the built environment, exploring unanticipated tensions, interactions, and dialogue between commercial images and their surroundings. With the billboards, commercial images dominate cityscapes around the world, they tend to be decontextualized from their surroundings. They often occupy, and define, the urban margins and 'empty' spaces. On the other hand, the imagery found on construction hoardings project aspirational images of the future onto these urban spaces while concealing the current status of disorder. The medium of the photograph draws attention to the temporality of commercial images with an ongoing process of urban transformation, while capturing the role these ephemeral images play in this very process.
The production and exhibition of this work was supported by a 2008 research fellowship from the Clarence Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies at Cornell University and a 2013 Artist Fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. The full series has been exhibited at Mayor’s Gallery, Boston City Hall and at Klapper Gallery, Queens College (New York) as a joint exhibition with Anthony Hamboussi called Urban Imaginaries, with individual images having been exhibited elsewhere.
For a more in-depth reflection on this body of work, see my feature in Places.
