Horror Vacui

A project surveying the material presence of empty billboards in the American West and their capacity to reflect the environments that surround them.

Anecdote of the Jar

I thought about this poem by Wallace Stevens, from 1954, off and on throughout the years I travelled and worked on this project.

“I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.”