New Ghuznee Street art billboard

New Ghuznee Street art billboard

July 19, 2012

Most billboards may be seen as trying to shout at viewers to attract their attention. Caroline McQuarrie’s new billboard, Friends are the best things in life, is much quieter. She has said of her work that it is about “trying to escape the loudness that we live with every day, the constant barrage of noise and action.”

The image is a flatbed scan of the artist’s hands holding a mass produced object that emulates a handcrafted tapestry. In the act of scanning, the object has moved and the scanner, being unable to read all that it is scanning, has added random coloured pixels into the image.

Domestic textiles have been a constant feature of McQuarrie’s practice and the series, of which this is part, extends her ongoing investigation of craft and contemporary photography. Both mediums, she says, can potentially be used sentimentally as an aid to memory and the partially represented clichéd maxim alludes to this. Her hands holding the object reference the history of domestic use of such items.

The distortion inherent in the image, in its application to a billboard, serves a double purpose both drawing attention to and disrupting billboard conventions to communicate clearly and secondly making us aware that something more is going on here beyond the act of representing what may have been a family treasure. We are acutely aware that we are looking at a construction of pixels rather than a particular object itself.

McQuarrie appears to be asking viewers to quietly “stand and stare”, to linger, to ponder, in the midst of the city, this image redolent of domesticity of a bygone era.

McQuarrie has a Master of Fine Arts (with distinction) and is a lecturer in photography at Massey University College of Creative Arts, Wellington.

This project has been supported by the Creative Communities Wellington Local Funding Scheme.

ENDS

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