Signs of the Times

Title
Signs of the Times

Year
2012

Medium:
Suite of digital photos

Dimensions:
Variable

Photo Credit:
Mark King

Collector:
Collection of artist

Discarded traffic signs procured from Barbados’ Ministry of Transport and Works, have been painted on and placed in rural environments with young men and women – migrant workers from Guyana. This suite of digital photographs proposes a link between road signs giving information to road users and to control the flow of vehicular traffic and the role of the state in controlling the flow of intra-Caribbean human traffic. There is an element of the ridiculous and absurd evident in the act of placing these signs in contexts with migrant agricultural and domestic workers who provide essential labour. 

---

Dialitza Colón, excerpt from the catalogue of the 4ta TRIENAL POLI/GRAFICA de San Juan: América Latin y el Caribe

“Whether documented or undocumented, the work aims to expose how Caribbean people treat Caribbean people as “other” and the complicity of the state in breaking up family units.

“Is it true that humans, in order to become “beings”, need a gaze that sees them and recognizes” them? The logic of the recognition that grants the right to be, while the other receives it, is the basis of the relationship between citizens and immigrants, between “us” and “them”. 

Thus, we might think that representations (or identifications), as constructions, are always a fabrication. Davis’s work sites itself conceptually here, questioning the forms of recognition and representation by means of the traffic signs and signals we encounter in public spaces. Her photographs play with the signs and signals we encounter in public spaces. Her photographs play with the signs and demonstrate the state’s efforts to “grammaticalize” and normatize contemporary identities. Certainly, art, in its most political forms, has some difficulty thinking about and representing identities “outside of the box” of essentialist ideas, in constant relation with ideas of traffic, transit(ion), displacement.”

Signs of the Times was exhibited as part of Displaced images / Images in space, Old Arsenal of the Spanish Navy, The 4th San Juan Poly / Graphic Triennial: Latin America and the Caribbean, curated by Gerardo Mosquera