Duncan Oja

Show ran from 9/1/2013 to 9/21/2013

Join us for our Opening Friday, August 30 from 6-9 pm

Duncan Oja's work focuses on the American landscape, roads, and the culture of interstate travel. His photographs are often about people, but rarely of them. He is more interested in the structures that we create, inhabit, and leave behind. In Significance he focuses on road signs and billboards across America. Ignoring their specific messages, the signs become symbolic of the general link they create between the physical landscape and the invisible world of language and concept; metaphors for metaphor. By looking at signs from behind, that link is severed and their purpose subverted. The signs lose their intended message and become only things, signifiers without their signified, monuments of absence.Perhaps more like the backs of signs than the fronts, the meaning of these photographs is somewhat ambiguous and left to the viewer, more aesthetic than semiotic. As the signs become only objects and find a place in the landscape, the photographs are quiet and stand on their own as images, outside of any conceptual framework.