Sam Durant

ELECTRIC SIGNS ‘When do we start rioting?’

2017

Electric sign, aluminium lightbox – Screenprinted on translucent film

40 × 30 cm

Edition of 25 copies, signed and numbered by the artist on the back sticker and on the certificate

Out of stock

about this work

For several years, Durant has used archival photographs of protests around the world as source material for both drawings and text-based pieces rendered as large-scale light boxes. By isolating the message articulated by the protester and putting it into a format typically used for commercial signage, the artist poses questions about the role of language and how meaning is constructed.

about Sam Durant

Sam Durant is a multimedia artist whose works engage a variety of social, political, and cultural issues. Often referencing American history, his work explores the varying relationships between culture and politics, engaging subjects as diverse as the civil rights movement, southern rock music, and modernism.

Over the last twenty years, Durant has mined the image archives of international protests and demonstrations, from the early twentieth century to the present, as sources for drawings and large-scale lightbox signs. In the lightboxes, hand-drawn statements are transferred from the source photographs into a format typically associated with commercial signage and advertising. Spontaneous, rapid and subjective messages are transmitted through an informational display mode; and yet the statements achieve new urgency and power from their dispassionate conveyance. Durant channels and enhances the contrarianism, humour, utopianism or challenge embedded in each handwritten slogan. The tension between emotive content and minimalist form expands the meaning of each text – opening it to different inferences and possibilities.

(courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ)

 

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Other works by Sam Durant

Sam Durant - Alone, we are a drop, Together, an ocean, 2023

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Alone, we are a drop | Together, an ocean

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Sam Durant - DO GOOD THINGS! - 2021

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DO GOOD THINGS!

Sam Durant - ELECTRIC SIGNS ‘Everyone deserves a dream!’ - 2017

Sam Durant

ELECTRIC SIGNS ‘Everyone deserves a dream!’

Sam Durant - ELECTRIC SIGNS ‘Consider listening' - 2017

Sam Durant

ELECTRIC SIGNS ‘Consider listening'

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