“Our air is now chokingly thick with language posing as silence”

-Kenneth Goldsmith.

The Signs of the Times - The Dispossession of Vancouver, Main Street Edition covers the period of March 18 - April 14, 2020. It began after I was encouraged to close my store and stay home in self isolation due to Covid-19. I had written a sign on March 16 announcing the temporary closing of my shop and when I re-encountered it, I realized that it’s content was no longer valid, the circumstances had already changed. “I no longer regretted that first sign that had been erased, because this one seemed vastly more beautiful to me,” Italo Calvino. I thought, how many other shops had closed and what was written on their provisional signs?

So I began at 7th Ave, walking up the West side of Main Street to where the commercial section breaks at 33rd Ave and back down the East side, capturing the psychogeography of Main Street through it’s new signs. Documenting this moment in my community felt significant; the humor, the threat, the sadness, the encouragement. During that time of quarantine, the signs were politely screaming.

I documented over 300 signs from diverse establishments all pertaining to the same event, related by context, varied in interpretation, each unique in their display and form. Using words does not make something transparent and in order for text to be communicated it requires material, but we rarely notice the material properties of language that surrounds us in the street. The variants in the execution of the signage on Main Street during social distancing includes: the substrate, the writing tool, the size, the colours, the adherent, the tone and of course the language.