Last winter artists Marc Fischer and Matti Allison created a series of collages in which they arranged photos from ads and magazines to suggest a relationship among the images. The Logan Square gallery Temporary Services displayed the collages in its storefront window. “People walked by and really understood it, without understanding it was artwork,” says Fischer. “It made sense to them.”
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After their display came down, Fischer tried to think of other places to put the collages where the non-gallery-hopping public could see them. Stapling or pasting the pieces to a wall was out, he says, “because the people who put up huge posters for movies and concerts could plaster right over them.” Then he hit on the idea of affixing the images on the hinged freestanding signs–or sandwich boards–used by businesses from upscale restaurants to downtown parking garages. “It’s a form that the public already understands,” he says. “And it seems like a form that artists could use and then move around without having to ask for permission.”
Other pieces include a seaworthy sign on water skis with a canvas sail by Oli Watt, who also made a bird feeder designed to attract pigeons. Zena Sakowski and Rob Kelly created a series of nine signs that can be turned into miniature-golf holes, each outfitted with its own club, balls, and map showing the way to the next one. Erik Brown has made two versions of his old-fashioned valet parking sign–he’ll trash one beforehand in hopes that the public will take pity on the other and leave it alone. Michael Piazza and a teenager from the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center have created a variation on an eye chart that shows the increasingly harsher sentences for young offenders.
