design-phan

For ten years, Philadelphia photographer Zoe Strauss has shown her work in a particularly gritty museum without walls, a section of an underpass located beneath I-95 in South Philadelphia. Her annual one-day exhibition was based on Homer’s Odyssey and was meant to illuminate “the epic narrative about the beauty and struggle of everyday life.” Throughout the decade, she accrued recognition and comparisons to Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin for her documentation of life in the city’s rougher neighborhoods. A mid-career retrospective called Zoe Strauss: Ten Years, opens at the Philadelphia Museum of Art on Jan. 14. The Billboard Project, consisting of more than 50 billboards featuring her photographs around the city, is an extension of that museum exhibition. I watched one of them go up on Thursday.

An account exec from Clear Channel, who, along with Krain Outdoor Advertising, donated the billboards for the project, handed the billboard to Zoe all folded up and she joked that it felt like a flag ceremony. It looked like one, too. The  billboards are giant, but the material carrying the image is lightweight and feels like Gore Tex. It’s called Ecoflex. The Clear Channel rep said they switched to Ecoflex about three years ago. It’s easier to put up and more environmentally friendly than the old-style ads with paste. Clear Channel sends retired Ecoflex ads to Avangard who recycles them into railroad ties — which presumably won’t happen with Zoe’s artwork.

Here it is going up at Reed and Passyunk, at the triangle (Acme/CVS/Rita’s/Triangle Tavern). The guy installing it looped some rope attached to the Ecoflex sheet up and around hooks at the top  of the billboard and pulled and tightened. The image is of Antoinette Conti, one of Zoe’s neighbor’s at 13th and Wharton. She is bound, determined, and framed against clear blue sky.

The ClearChannel exec remarked that more advertisements should look like this: simple, straightforward with just an image and no text. He observed that most advertisers try to cram in too much information but that a simple graphic is much more effective for communicating a message.

Here’s Antoinette again, as Zoe meant for her to be seen. The cell towers behind and above the billboard are her crown — the piece is called “La Corona,” which means “the crown” in both Italian and Spanish. This language bridge signifies the changing demographics of Conti’s neighborhood, which was once mostly Italian and is now settled by a large community of Mexican immigrants.

The fact that Zoe’s work is going up on billboards is fitting because of her mandate to make art of the street and to make the street her museum. As seen in this image, Everything (2005, Philadelphia), she captures the city’s sense of place as much as she does its characters. Those characters include the city’s abandoned houses and lots, shuttered businesses, and quirky pizza parlors.

Tara Murtha of the Philadelphia Weekly has a great account of the rest of the preview tour here.

{last two images, courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art}

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2012 at 1:41 am and is filed under Events, events and exhibitions, field trips (local), graphic, Local Design, Philadelphia Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.