Question what you are looking at always…

As I rode home this fall I came across this tree which had just lost all of its leaves. It was an amazing burst of color and it was as if someone flipped the switch off for whatever held all those leaves to the tree. One day they were all on the tree and the next there was a perfect bright yellow blanket below it. I decided this would be a great place for my first project.

That night I penciled out a few concepts I had been thinking about all evening and went back to visit the tree to see if the idea I liked would work. I knew that this would be a time sensitive project if the wind decided to pick up my perfect sea of yellow would be scattered across the park. I did my test and it worked out just as well as I hoped. The next thing I had to decide was what I was going say. Look which is the name of this project would have been fine but not what I was wanting. Yellow would have stated the obvious but seemed kind of boring. I decided I wanted to make people not just notice a word in the leaves but question it and ponder why someone would choose to write red in this large blanket of yellow. Now I know exactly what I want to say and do.

I drew up some plans for the word to be seen from quite a distance away I want it to make a real impact on the viewer not just in the fact it is an oddity seeing letter forms in the leaves but in the size they were written as well. I scaled my letters out at 8ft tall and 4ft wide. This size seemed large enough paper but when I got on site that morning I figured out it was about half the size I needed to have the impact I wanted.

We all got out on site early the next day and began to clear away the leaves revealing the very dark green grass that lay below it was a very nice contrast. I would lay out each stroke and the kids would help me clear the leaves. We would take the discarded leaves and rebroadcast them out across the rest of the yellow so it looked as nothing else was disturbed. After about 3 hours the project was complete.

My wife took the kids home and I stayed to watch how people would react as they passed by. I was pretty amazed really in the level to which people don’t take their eyes off the path they are walking, jogging or riding. I had a few people who would glance and then take a second hard look but keep moving along without missing a stride. Most people just kept their head down never looking up to make sure the sky is still in the place it is supposed to be. I did have 2 groups of people over the course of the afternoon actually stop and walk over to take a closer look. One group decided they needed to take some pictures to share with their friends. It will be interesting over the course of this project to see what it is that will make people look at what is going on around them.

This is what it's all about

I like to spin around our great city and take in all the sites grand and small. I have noticed over the last few years that people are traversing our pathways with blinders on to the world around them, ipods in their ears looking directly forward as if in a trance. You can nod as you pass, raise your hand and wave and maybe one out of ten people will acknowledge you. There are so many amazing things happening around us and it seems as if most people have switched off. I don't know the cause. I imagine that it's just content overload. Computers, 250 channels of TV, Satellite Radio, itunes, text messaging - the list goes on and on.

I want to find a way to pull people's attention away from all the made-up content in the world and remind them of what an amazing place the environment they live in really is. From the foothills in their backyard to the army of ants crossing the sidewalk at their feet or a new sapling rising out of the ground just off the green belt. I want to remind people that the acres and acres of green grass in our parks is a great place to lie down and just take a nap.

I propose to call people's attention in the most literal way: signs. Bold signs in settings that people are not used to seeing them. Large arrows with impossible to ignore text that points out a bird nesting in the tree above them. Or large dimensional letters that say PLAY HERE in an open field or pointing out discarded trash along the riverbank. There are a thousand different things that could use a new call to attention.

I plan to make no less than twenty unique calls to people's attention over the next 12 months. Each sign will be displayed in and around the downtown area. All signs will be made with 95% found and reused materials crafted into professional looking signs at Trademark Sign Company. Look! will be a family project that my children, Brooke, age 6 and Jack, age 10, are very excited to participate in. The project will be documented through photography and video with spectator reactions and comments uploaded to a Web blog after each event.

I'm excited at the possibilities for a project like this to take people if only for a few moments out of their media saturated worlds and remind them of this special and fragile environment we call home.