We often hear about air pollution and water pollution, but a new art exhibit calls attention to something so prevalent most of us tune it out: visual pollution. As part of the DesertX art exhibition, Jennifer Bolande has taken over a series of billboards near Palm Springs, California and replaced the advertisements with perfectly-aligned photos of the landscapes the billboards are blocking.
According to the Desert X website, Bolande’s work utilizes classic advertising techniques to make a compelling point against consumerism.
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.
Bolande’s work is part of the DesertX exhibition which uses the desert landscape of California’s Coachella Valley to articulate global and local issues that range from climate change to golf.
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