Carlisle, 2013

Signs are everywhere, a mundane part of contemporary life: telling us what to do (or not to do), where to go, how fast, etc.  If we really stop and look though, signs reveal a lot more than just what they say.  They reflect the places in which they stand and the people who inhabit these places.  This series of images documents an array of signs around my hometown Carlisle, a small rural community north of Hamilton, Ontario.  In the range of different signs (and authors of these signs), from peeling, hand-painted to commercially produced, from inkjet printed to glowing neon, from municipally sanctioned to rogue spray paint, we see the tension between change and resistance, old and new, industrialization and conservation.