This project surveys the material presence of empty billboards and considers their capacity to comment on the environments that surround them.
For the last two 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 realities, but equally reminiscent of movie screens or unpainted canvases.
Beyond these associations, Horror Vacui is about filling up the photographic frame with a 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.