Roving through the blog for Toronto urban landscape magazine, Spacing, today, I found this story and was immediately drawn (pun intended) to the piece about public chalkboards.Started by a Halifax art student, the chalkboards -- replete with chalk and cleaning rags (and in this case, thankfully, a ladder) -- have begun popping up in the Nova Scotian capital.
"Locations were chosen based on how the site might normally be used as a place for advertising or other forms of communication that members of the public would normally not have access to, other than through the illegal act of graffiti," says the artist, on the project's web site.
Not one to be bored, this is chock-full of potential. Clever, though I can't imagine chalk would be too easy to read from billboard height. Still, it's an interesting way to look at, and question, communication in an urban landscape.
As an aside (isn't everything here?), I found these buttons on the Spacing site. While I collected buttons as a child (Mary Brown's apparently felt I was pretty special, or at least a 'Tater Lover'), I can't say I ever had a full set detailing Toronto's subway stops, right down to the stations' tiling patterns. Now I can. But I still don't think I'm stuck on them, though I can't quite pinpoint why.
1 comment:
I love the chalk project! Better yet would be to point a webcam at the board. And the buttons were a real throw back for me to the seven years we were in Toronto - Eglinton West and Coxwell were our main stations, as well as the downtown loop. Ross learned many of his letters reading exactly these typefaces - we had no car those years.
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