Kelly Xintaris

These works are from In Verses, an ongoing body of work rooted in image and text, and influenced by my experiences living in the city. I photograph certain signs that I find, where text is absent or covered over, and then I either add text to the image or leave it as-is. For the works in this exhibition, I photographed empty signs, in which nothing was declared; there were no longer any words attempting to tell you what to think. Then I digitally integrated text, to create “new” signs. The words “You are in yourself again” are from a Gwendolyn Brooks poem titled “An Aspect of Love, Alive in the Ice and Fire,” which extends from the profoundly personal to the societal in its complexities. The billboards in “Not For Nothing” emerged from my imagination, while wandering through a familiar area of my life. These signs in these works are defiant, disrupting the language, assumptions, and expectations of public space. In playing with the juxtapositions of images and text, my concerns have to do with the relationships between sociological possibility, personal experience, and the ubiquity of advertising. The everyday built environment is often the nexus and focus of these confrontations. On a broader level, my work leads me to go beyond a circumnavigation of the obvious, to an exploration of what is, what was, and what can only be imagined.