Tents (Cost of Living)

When I first developed this series, I was thinking about urban survival and about the materials that would be available in a post-collapse world. Billboard vinyl is a standout material, evidenced by their commercial applications both as textiles for consumer goods as well as durable tarps for covering crops and farming equipment.

There are a number of common patterns for survival shelters, and they are readily available in a number of places. Finding the billboard images was significantly more difficult. I wanted to use real billboards exactly as they were displayed. I began to collect images of billboards and used an upscaling application to make them usable.

The images were “folded” in photoshop using the combination of layers, gradients, and perspective tools to create the illusion.

The tents were displayed in a two-person show at Spokane Falls College, Cost of Living. The prints were shown alongside video work and a related sculpture. The sculpture was a life-sized survival tent created by quilting together rectangular sections of material which were cut from real, retired billboards.

The tents series comments on the cost of living, on the likelihood of economic collapse, and encourages the viewer to consider the kind of world they want to make after the current one collapses.