The 2012 Billboard Art Project in Richmond includes a weekend-only Sight & Sound show, featuring an audio component which viewers can tune in to on a local radio station. The month-long show also features work by artists from all over the United States, as well as around the world, including over 20 Virginia artists. In addition, you will be seeing artwork by students in grades kindergarten through 12th grade.
The 2012 billboard has the same location as our very first billboard art show in 2010: on the west side of Interstate 195.
The side where art will be showing faces south and can be seen by north bound traffic on the left side. For longer viewing, you can park under the billboard by traveling north on N. Hamilton street until you cross Westwood Avenue. Then hang a right on the dirt road just after the highway overpass. Google Street View.
Download Schedules
Whose art is on when? Want to see it again? Each week and weekend has a different schedule with approximate showtimes. Click on each one to download the .pdf or download all at once.
On weekends, the 2012 Richmond Billboard Art Project schedule will include a Sight & Sound show, featuring works with an audio component that runs simultaneously with the imagery. Viewers can tune in to the short-range FM signal, which is audible within a radius of 150 feet of the billboard. We will be broadcasting off of 105.1 FM on Saturdays and Sundays starting at 12 a.m., 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. These shows will also be podcast. For complete information about this project and its participants, please download this pdf.
Click titles to get project description and links to artist websites
This collaborative project explores the possibilities of language beyond its denotative form. Both artists use language as a technology, abandoning restrictions of representation, grammar and syntax to explore the possibilities of invention inherent in the visual forms of type and the aural nuance of speech.
For this piece, the greeting “hello” was the jumping-off point, as it marks the potential energy of connectivity and the starting point of a bond, either ephemeral or long-lasting. In the words of Trin T. Minh Ha, “That we’ve met means fate binds us.”
Time Capsule tells a story of a young woman in post-apocalyptic Richmond, VA. It imagines a world where destruction is inevitable, regrets are mourned, memory serves as the main source of happiness and finding the most basic needs is more difficult than ever. Erin, the protagonist, reminisces about her life before the destruction, describes the urgency of the situation, and demonstrates wisdom as she articulates lessons she’s learned in the end.
The piece is made up of a series of still images displayed on an LED billboard and sound broadcast over a short-range FM signal. Visible on I-195 and audible within one mile on FM radio, this site-specific work is experienced best from an abandoned parking lot underneath the billboard.
The parking lot where the viewer can stop is the same place where Erin used to hang out with her friends before an untold catastrophe occurred and turned her world upside down. This is the setting of the story. It is also the place where the viewer can find the box that Erin and her friends hid at the site - at the bottom of the billboard itself. The GPS coordinates are given at the end of her story.
The project is a collaboration between Maria Dumlao and Michele Guieu that began during the Billboard Art Project “Sight and Sound Weekend Residency” in January 2012. Both artists have participated individually in previous Billboard Art Project’s shows in 2011.
By Kimberly Witham (visual) & Industry of the Ordinary (sound).
This project invites the viewer to revel in the beauty that surrounds them, especially when that beauty is found unexpectedly. The project further invites the audience to contemplate not what would be gained by a journey into the next life, but what would be lost.
"#lifeessentials" is an audio-visual collaboration for radio and billboard by Mike Bodine and Alli Miller. The project references a digitized world that strives towards the maintenance of nature and the sacrosanct. The digital billboard displays to passersby a composite of emoji, images of unrealized products, cropped poetic statements, and recontextualized slogans while broadcasting a loop of synthesized meditative sounds.
For our Billboard Art Project - "Sight and Sound" art collaborative we chose to focus on the act and mechanisms involved in constructing the billboard itself. Having the look and feel of an orchestrated graphic novel, the composition strives to celebrate the dance that is involved in the various stages of construction of these giant, heavy, and electrified billboard structures. Heroic and bold visuals seamlessly combine with the sound composition to weave a fine tapestry of the elements of construction – becoming more clear and complete throughout the progression.
By Jason Sayner (visual) & John Dombroski (sound).
Location, location, location. The visual journey begins by graphically locating the billboard structure within the context of the entire mid-Atlantic region. Subsequent panels zoom in, continuing to site the structure within an increasingly detailed environment. The progression terminates with a time lapse study of the shadow casting effects that the billboard structure has on its environment. Sounds have been created with a focus on location, navigation, and communication. Implementing multiple recordings of electro-magnetic interference and morse code (detailing the geographic location of the billboard), the work is an attempt to amplify and interpret the surface noise of so many travelers between 'there' and 'here'.
Created in analog, processed in digital, "Journey Through Broken" presents a fragmented narrative in sight and sound -- a voyage as tenuous as the image itself, and a possible resolution.
By Claire Accardo (visual) & Jennifer Rarick (sound).
Trespasses addresses the inequity between the "high gloss" billboard (and all that it represents) and the lack of care for the land on which it is erected. Using found images and sounds from the location of the billboard, the piece shows a descent from the very polished and glamorous to the more degraded and overgrown, representing the transformation of the land over time.
While individual elements used might not be considered beautiful in their original context, once they have been isolated and recontextualized, they work together to create an aesthetically pleasing progression of sound and imagery.
By Rachael Gorchov (visual) & David Morrison (sound).
In "Then and Now and Everything in Between," Rachael Gorchov and David Morrison begin their artistic exploration with a stock photograph and assign it sound that draws from advertising. Over the course of 15 minutes, they break down the sound and image into a rhythmic collage, often referencing sublime painterly expressions and encouraging a trance-like state. The piece encourages people to consider life as a collection of moments that exist in our memory as timeless, omnipresent influences. The use of stock media relies on its ability to connect to shared moments thus emphasizing the idea that meaningful experiences in individual lives are often universal.
Members of the public were asked to define what normal is. The audio is a comprehensive record of their responses but the visuals pick out selected words and phrases so that, when experienced simultaneously, a disquieting dissonance is created as the audience contemplates this unexpectedly elusive term.
Of the 2012 Richmond Billboard Art Project, with links to their websites, if available. This list does not include students from the schools listed below.
Thank you to all the educators and students who participated in the 2012 Richmond, VA Billboard Art Project! The show features work from the following schools: