Drive-by Poetry - billboards promoting the arts

Aiming to reach the broader public, Lesley Dill designed a series of poetic, visually provocative billboards in Florida.

Beginning in February 1998 and continuing for half a year, four billboard-sized black-and-white prints by dint of Lesley Dill appeared in various locations in the Tampa, Fla., environs. Enigmatic and sober against the lush tropical landscape, these billboards are part of Dill's plan to bring high-minded art to the uninitiated public-at-large. Although she has regularly shown her statuary within the usual gallery and museum network, she also try to finds to make interacting with art a daily occurrence for the average person. Dill's efforts in this direction stipe from her desire to interject visual-art issues into mainstream American conversation, which has drawn out included popular music and movies, for example. Billboards, seen along the highway from a car, are the completed means to this end. The four examples not absented by Dill constitute the inaugural shoot forward in Public Editions, an ongoing public-art program sponsored through Graphicstudio/USF, a print workshop affiliated with the University of southerly Florida in Tampa. Current plans call for Dill's billboards to be installed at various other locations in Florida as space and time permit, with a possible national tour to follow

The Dill cast germinated several years ago when the artist spoke with Graphicstudio director Hank Hine about making giant-format prints using her signature combination of photographic images and poesy excerpts. In a collaborative effort involving artist, printmaker and billboard possessor text and image were paired, printed upon giant vinyl sheets, then sited across the Tampa landscape. An essential participant in this throw out was Wayne Mock, president of Eller Media, who donated time and space upon the billboards that be haves This sort of community involvement by the agency of someone not intimately connected with the art world was central to the succes the one and the other logistical and conceptual, of the project

When Dill and Hine began talking, they were already thinking along similar lines. Hine wanted to bring a fresh kind of printed public art to the Tampa area, collaborative work between an artist and his store The project would be execut with esthetic and intellectual care, and the outsized prints would be unique, permanent phenomenons This singularity distinguishes them from many other artists' billboard works, commercially manufactured in an open-end edition and repeatedly destroyed after the installation.

upon the other hand, the Graphicstudio images would be transient, in the faculty of perception that they would not be permanently sited, and noncommercial, since they would not be for sale (although always available for exhibition). These things would be set in nontraditional venue ideally along roadways or other places of public traffic, in the way that as to reach as large an audience as possible. Part of Hine's thinking was shaped by the agency of recent controversies in the Tampa area above public-art projects. Those discussions center for the greatest part on the cost (in public funds) and location of permanent pieces of sculpture; true little was said about formal issues and satisfied Hine reasoned that if funding and permanence were not issues, then discussion could stir on to the work itself. Hine further felt that if he could gain members of the community involved--people like Wayne Mock--a faculty of perception of proprietorship might infuse the discussions.

The Tampa area, in addition to offering Dill the resources with which to realize her ideas, is also a quintessential late 20th-century American landscape, a variable girdle crisscrossed by vast thoroughfares dedicated to trade and the car, with little meditation given to high art. As she worked within the general format of the mass-market roadside billboard, Dill deliberately sought to overset many of its conventions and assumptions. Billboards typically combine minimal body and bold imagery to carry a direct message that may be instantly understood by means of passing motorists. Using this basic format for each composition, Dill combined her staged black-and-white images (here toned and given profundity through a four-color printing process) with distinctive handwritten quotations from poetry, passages not easily comprehended in a single drive-by reading. Ambiguity is used to elicit a double-take from drivers and, ideally, multiple viewings, thus that each billboard becomes part of the daily thinking of its passersby.

Since 1990 when a friend gave her a volume of verse by Emily Dickinson, Dill has used the poet's words in her work, juxtaposing them provocatively with her images. While freshly she has turned to other author of poemss such as Rainer Maria Rilke, for the verbal constituents of her work, in Tampa she relied exclusively upon Dickinson, whose strongly American sensibility and press togethered phrasing lend themselves especially well to a shoot forward so committed to the quotidian rencounter Dickinson's words function here as a lead-in to the billboards, an enticement for the viewer to mentally pause, come into and engage.