Bemis and Borysevicz Bring Billboard Art to Northwest Omaha New York-based artist Mathieu Borysevicz will use the billboard overlooking the intersection of 90 th and Maple to explore how large-scale advertising images affect our personal space and visual perceptions. His project Untitled (Omaha, Nebraska) is in collaboration with the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and is made possible by funding from the Peter Kiewit Foundation, the Nebraska Arts Council and LAMAR Advertising and a generous grant from the Nimoy Foundation. The project will be unveiled in late April, and will run for four weeks through the end of May. Borysevicz creates a photographic installation in the form of a site-specific billboard, which provides a view from the sign itself as it looks down over Maple Street. This vantage point cuts across four traffic lanes clustered with chain stores, strip malls and advertising. The artist has been developing a series of such billboards over the past six years, and he creates them in response to the proliferation of large-scale advertising upon the urban environment. By providing a direct, uncensored image of a well-trafficked road, Borysevicz provides viewers with a starting point for inquiring into how such structures and images affect the perceptions of our everyday worlds. Although highways and byways are public spaces, we view these places from the privacy of our cars. For this reason, the roadside encroaches onto our common consciousness, neon lights and franchise signs permanently etching their messages onto our collective identity. “It is also an attempt to address a larger, fresher audience and therefore to stimulate contemplation in a different context, or better yet, to stimulate collective déjà-vu,” Borysevicz said. To find out more about Mathieu Borysevicz and the project and the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts visit here. [Main Page]