Artist Swaps Billboards With Pictures Of The Landscapes They’re Hiding

Art Installation by Jennifer Bolande for Desert X
Photograph by Lance Gerber Studio
Visible Distance / Second Sight is an art installation made by Jennifer Bolande for DesertX. In this temporary artwork, there was a series of consecutive billboards that have been swapped by totally aligned photos of the sceneries they are hiding.

From the DesertX project page:

"Each photograph is unique to its position along this route and at a certain point as one approaches each billboard, perfect alignment with the horizon will occur thus reconnecting the space that the rectangle of the billboard has interrupted.

In the language of billboard advertising this kind of reading is referred to as a Burma-Shave after the shaving cream company of the same name who used sequential placement to create messaging that could be read only from a moving vehicle.

Within the desert empire of roadside signs, Bolande chooses to advertise the very thing so often overlooked. Looking up at the billboards our attention is drawn back to the landscape itself, pictured here as a stuttering kinesthetic of real and artificial horizons."

The Coachella Valley and its desert landscape were the canvas for a curated exhibition of site-specific work by established and rising artists. Their projects illustrated global and local topics that varied from climate change to shining skies, from tribal art and immigration to tourism, video games, and golf.

See more at desertx.org

Here are some amazing examples of the project:


Art Installation by Jennifer Bolande for Desert X
Photograph by Lance Gerber Studio


Art Installation by Jennifer Bolande for Desert X
Photograph by Lance Gerber Studio


Art Installation by Jennifer Bolande for Desert X
Photograph by Lance Gerber Studio


Art Installation by Jennifer Bolande for Desert X
Photograph by Lance Gerber Studio