10.5' x 22.8' billboard, Philadelphia, PA

Billboard on top of the Snow White Diner across the street from Christ Church in Old City, Philadelphia, PA 

Longing out of place images the possibility of transcendence within the world, of faith within the profane, of revelation within the everyday.

Philadelphia is a city of history, a city of carefully commodified events and sites, each precisely constructed to sustain a myth about founding heroism and puritan ethics. The billboard is located right in the middle of the tourist tour, particularly close to Christ Church. Founded over three hundred years ago, one enters Christ Church, otherwise known as "the Nation's church," through its gift shop, framing our experience of the sacred within a commodity culture. This carefully created icon speaks as one of the foremost markers of Philadelphia's self representation; its own tourist pamplet marks the building of the steeple with a quote from the local press in 1775 "in point of elegance and taste, it surpasses everything of the kind in America."

We forget that the steeple is hoping to reach the divine and instead see it imaged as a tourist destination in postcards, painted plaster replicas, in tourist guides. In the two tremendously enlarged xeroxes on each side of the billboard the steeple appears in stark black and white as an outline, emphasizing its current role as surface, suggesting no depth. At the same time, the steeple could be from any Christian church in America as its identifying marks (so important a part of its mythologizing in Philadelphia) have been reduced by photography's power to endlessly duplicate.

The center image in this triptych is of a ladder reaching up into the sky. We might climb this ladder, might feel the possibility of reaching, might reach into the depths of our longing. This simple, spacious color image avoids commodified cultural symbols, instead imaging an ordinary aluminum construction ladder, suggesting that it is within the everyday that transcendence might be approached.