This project surveys the material presence of empty billboards and considers their capacity to comment on the environments that surround them.
For the last few years I have taken notice of and been actively searching for very clean, very white billboards, the kind that seem to present nothing but their own monumental physicality. Without the company of an advertisement to distract us, each billboard becomes an ambiguous fixture within the built environment, possibly indicative of economic and social collapse, but equally reminiscent of the potential dramas available to movie screens and unpainted canvases.
Above all, the project continues to serve as a visual response to the bewilderment in and confrontation of an object’s recovered material reality. It is only through the manifest blankness of each billboard that we encounter it — and possibly for the first time — as a physical object cast into landscapes of arguably equal emptiness.
— Sherwin Rivera Tibayan, Norman, Oklahoma, USA