In Plain Site

“In Plain Sight,” a continuation of “Lost for Words,” was shot in 2015 and 2016, while searching for shreds of plastic randomly caught in the barbed-wire fences that define the property owner’s land adjacent to prairie highways and roads. Returning to photograph in the seemingly lifeless season between winter and spring, my long fascination with empty and dead signs was reinforced through my discovery again of these abandoned signs. Found in a very different geographical location some twenty-two hundred miles away from where the original series was photographed, I photographed forty- six sites where the extreme environmental forces are harsh in the seasonally muted and monotone wide-open spaces of the Alberta prairie landscape. Together with my initial study of these objects, I now found myself more informed and better to articulate Roland Barthes’ “message without a code” to the idea of the “optical unconscious.”