Seeing My Art in the “Real World”
👁️👁️ This makes it all make more sense.
Hello! I hope you’re having a beautiful day!
When you stand on the street, do you often consider all the art and creativity around you? If creativity is the force that humans apply in order to “create,” then it’s essentially everywhere around us in any built space at all times. How does it get there? What does it all mean?
Recently I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of having my work on display outdoors in public in multiple contexts. It’s a novelty that I didn’t expect to find as exciting as I do, and it makes me think about what it means that so many artists today show our work most often though screens and out of any real human context. When we give ourselves the label “artist,” we often disqualify ourselves from contributing to many of the day-to-day spaces we all move through as humans.
In my day-job at Muse Marketing, we recently put together an ad campaign for the Dundas Valley School of Art, which was implemented as a series of bus shelter ads throughout the city. This job was incredibly satisfying, coming in on a pretty tight deadline. That quick turnaround contributed directly to the design of the work, and I think it was a powerful constraint.
The concept was a collaboration between our team and client but the design - the specific look of it - was an example of the rare and satisfying experience of seeing the design in my head when we started the project and finding the finished product to be almost exactly what I had in mind. That doesn’t happen every day.
My main goal with the ads was to set our designs apart from everything else you see on bus shelter ads these days. In the case of our lovely city of Hamilton, that means it’s mostly government PSAs about bladder cancer, personal injury lawyers hoping you’ve been seriously hurt (and holding a grudge), and the classic real estate agent ads (made all the more dystopian by usually having a person experiencing homeless sleeping in front of them). Frankly, these are not the most inspiring “works of art” to see in your city all day.
For that reason, I wanted these ads to make an impact by adding colour and flair everywhere they were put, and I’m happy to say I think they did exactly that.
When the job was finished and I started to notice the ads around the city, it was satisfying to see that they had turned out well. It was similar to the relief felt after delivering a design for a logo or a digital ad when you see it used in context and can tell it fulfills its required purpose. But with this job I also had a very interesting feeling of satisfaction that I don’t usually get from my work. There was something different about these ads that filled me up in a way I don’t normally feel.
It wasn’t until I went around to photograph some of the ads that I realized what it was: it was seeing them in this context - in the world. Seeing my work with people standing around it, waiting for the bus, driving by. Seeing my art have an impact on the day-to-day experience of being in my city. It’s not something I’m used to!
Not long after the ads went up, I was pleasantly surprised to get tagged in a post from local art supply/book shop legend Mixed Media/King West Books shouting out the installation of my Traffic Signal Cabinet wrap that had gone up near their store. Long ago, now, I talked about the ideas that went behind Traffic-Signal-Bot, and after a long wait suddenly it was up!
This was an even crazier experience because of how personal this project was. It was completely self-directed and full of experimentation, which makes its position on a busy (and familiar) street corner feel almost like an imposition on the city. When I went to see the box in person, I was overwhelmed by this mixed feeling of excitement and guilt - like I had corrupted this public space with my silly artwork.
As I watched people walk past the box, though, I realized something weirdly wonderful - nobody was paying much attention to it. It was suddenly clear to me that this invasion of art into the street had gone mostly unnoticed in a way that allowed my art to become part of the space. And I wasn’t guilty anymore, I was excited.
When you first start learning (formally) about commercial art, your teacher will ask you to pay attention to how art and design are everywhere. They’ll point out the label on a can of beans, the signs on a busy street of the countless advertisement we’re bombarded with from the moment we wake up.
“Now you’ll see this everywhere!” they’ll declare, like your life just became a less exciting version of They Live. The rest of the world is blind to the truth that all around us is art and design.
But they never tell you about what it’s like to have your work slip into that void. Not the void of irrelevance and noise that we’ve become used to online - where everyone has a voice but we’re all forced to shout over each other - but that collective void of art that’s taken for granted. The art you didn’t see until it was pointed out to you - that we accept as the material that covers the surfaces surrounding us.
For me, with these two recent projects dropped into the world in these mundane places, it was a surprisingly profound feeling to see strangers accept my work as part of the backdrop of their lives. Something for them to glance at in passing, forget they saw. Maybe, for a few of them, something they’ll remember and wonder about as they go about their lives.
I’m lucky to get the chance to make this weird impact on public spaces. I think advertising, especially, is such an intrusion on our lives that we seldom give much thought to. Maybe by making some ads less staggeringly boring or infuriatingly cynical, we can help people see that the creativity around them can be better. Or just that it’s there.
Have a great day!
Simon
🔔 Simon Status Update: What I’m Making Right Now
I’ve been bored with writing words, so instead I’ve been writing html. My new “personal” website/blog is finding its home on the platform Micro.blog and is half-finished right now while I try to figure out what I want to put there.
You can sneak a peek by visiting SimonPeng.net and see what I’m working on setting up. I’ve loaded in a custom font hosted right on the site and customized a lot of the CSS, which is hilariously satisfying considering how low-fi it all looks. But that’s kind of the point, and I’ll have more to say about that later.
😍