“Thoughts on Romance from the Road is an ongoing project that uses photography to document text interventions on roadside marquee signs. I place phrases on movie and motel marquee signs, many of which I find through research but also in the course of my frequent long distance travel by car. I use my own sign letters and then leave the scene with the words left intact upon the sign. Before I depart, I make a photograph from the sidewalk or roadside. I then make large-scale color prints as documents of the sign in its environment. The photograph becomes the sole remnant of the project as the letters inevitably disappear or are taken down. The work addresses the effect of media and technology upon human memory and desire.
© Victoria Crayhon, 17 x 23 cm, 24 pages, 100 numbered copies, 0-100 Editions
© Victoria Crayhon, 17 x 23 cm, 24 pages, 100 numbered copies, 0-100 Editions
In its brief existence, each sign installation is read by an audience comprised mostly of people in cars or by roadside foot traffic. The experience of the viewer seeing the work in the context of the outside world of roads, signs and billboards is important to me.
© Victoria Crayhon, 17 x 23 cm, 24 pages, 100 numbered copies, 0-100 Editions
© Victoria Crayhon, 17 x 23 cm, 24 pages, 100 numbered copies, 0-100 Editions
I am interested in viewers encountering my work in spaces they expect to see advertising or propaganda. The text phrases are the voice of an individual, deliberately personal yet sounding mysteriously familiar through the fragmented vernacular used within the spectacle of advertising. I use language that references aspirations toward contentment and fulfillment linked to promises of desire and romance provided by the realm of commodity and entertainment.
© Victoria Crayhon, 17 x 23 cm, 24 pages, 100 numbered copies, 0-100 Editions
My texts are formulated to read as regurgitations of that, as though they are public diary entries pertaining to banal realities of self and relationships based on comparison with an ideal.”
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Victoria Crayhon
Please note: all images and texts are protected by Copyright and belong to the Artist.