Arnold McBay

Signs of Our Discontent (The Textures of Our Solitude), a collaborative project with poet Gregory Betts was selected for the In The Soil Arts Festival and was on display in the downtown core of St. Catharines, Ontario April 27 > 29, 2018.

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2017 Project Statement: Signs of Our Discontent (The Textures of Our Solitude)

As we in the culture sector all know, St. Catharines is deep in a period of significant cultural flux. Given that change means displacement as much as advancement, it is important to reflect on the implications of cultural and technological progress. Marshall McLuhan notes that once a technology gets displaced, it becomes a source of art for the next technology. St. Catharines bears the trace of many such displacements, including in the ghost advertisements that haunt the sides of downtown buildings, promoting stores and products that no longer exist. The relentless optimism of all advertising, with their promise of happiness by a simple purchase, presages a darker discontent of a life without those new goods. In this way, the fetish value of goods in capitalism signals a discomfort with the cultural landscape that is always on the edge of euphoria and despair. Our project stands back from the relentless optimism of advertising and technological advancement by looking at these ‘Signs of our discontent’, taking displaced technologies and products as our content. Thus, an incandescent lightbulb is filled with a sheet of birchbark decorated with LetraSet slogans from the ghost advertisements in the downtown. The electric age meets the Mad Men of a lost corporate world bent on a global pillage. The project we envision consists of two or more small site-specific installations. Each installation will consist of a constellation of re-purposed lightbulbs each containing textual responses to the fading advertisements printed on birchbark. These installations will create an expanded reading of the traces of downtown St. Catharines’ commercial past, as well as a reminder of the endless potential of language.