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Friday, April 1 through Sunday, May 8
Opens Friday, April 1 at 6 PM
Paul Druecke & Jeffry Chiplis will be in attendance for the April 8 opening & reception for
Signments: Works by Jeffry Chiplis
Join us then for a reception and celebration of both installations!
LocuStLed displays messages from a curated selection of individuals via a vintage-style LED sign in the window of the Woodland Pattern Book Center. For five weeks beginning late-March, the project will publicize messages from approximately forty people. Contributors reflect wide-ranging perspectives, the one common attribute is a now-familiar constraint that each message is no longer than 140 characters.
The LED will be displayed in Woodland Pattern's storefront facing Locust Street. The project proposes an audience that is distinct from the bookstore's walk-in clientele and the self-subscribing networks of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, etc. The LED's contents will loop every hour, twenty-four hours a day, presenting a non-stop collage to the working-class neighborhood of Riverwest and the people passing through it. Locust Street is a major thoroughfare, moving thousands of commuters through the Milwaukee area each week. The project takes advantage of daily, rush hour bottlenecks that create stop and go traffic outside the bookstore.
LocuStLed transcribes the spirit of new millennium connectivity into a purposefully anachronistic sculptural display with said display's innately different sense of public. LED signs are a technological link between archaic forms of public inscription—like landmarks, plaques, and statuary—and today's data cloud that hovers intangibly overhead as an unwieldy record of human concerns. The project combines populist outreach and the art of social authority in order to create a hybrid footprint that rewinds the relationship between public pronouncement and digital interface. The project pays homage to Jenny Holzer's pioneering work with information systems.
Presented by Guest Curator Paul Druecke, and running concurrently with Signments: works by Jeffry Chiplis
Join the Conversation
We’d love to hear your message or response to the forty messages now scrolling 24/7 at 720 East locust. If we get enough messages they may find their way to a second iteration of the project!
Tweet to us @WoodlandPattern using #locustled
LocuStLed Contributors
Alec Finlay
Anika Wilson
Anne Bray
Arijit Sen
Assaf Evron
Brenda Cárdenas
Chuck Stebleton
Dan Torop
Debra Brehmer
Donna Stonecipher
Jason S. Yi
Jennifer Delos Reyes
Joshua Martin Ballew
Kate Sierzputowski
Margaret Noodin
Martha Wilson
Matt Cook
Alderman Michael J. Murphy
Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam
Monique Meloche
Nick Tobier
Nirmal Raja
Riverwest Coop
Riverwest Yogashala
Robert J. Baumann
Roberto Harrison
Roger White
Sabina Ott
Santiago Cucullu
Sara Krajewski
Sector 2337
Shalem Healing Inc.
Stacy Szymaszek
Stephanie Barber
Temporary Art Review
Thalia Field
Theresa Columbus
Thomas Hellstrom
Tyanna Buie
Zach Hill
Made possible with generous support from
