Billboards Detroit, brings together subtle reminders of past structures, past communities and the continual and unforgiving economic pressures that influence our built environments by photographer Grace Herbert. The collection, originally installed on billboards on the edges of the Hamtramck and Detroit advertises the obsolete.
During Grace Herbert’s most recent residency at Popps Packing, Herbert began to identify a vision of entropy on the outer edges; the things that are everywhere and everyday but not necessarily seen. Piles of rubble and stone, neatly levelled patches of dirt where a homes once stood, driveways that lead nowhere, and the noise of waste recycling factories grinding concrete from demolished structures. These entropic scenes can be found in a bleak vastness on the industrial zone that borders Hamtramck and Detroit. Once thriving communities, the city has taken and demolished in the name of public interest. This cycle seems never-ending; it is a process of land and matter disappearing over time. As Robert Smithson calls it… “ruins in reverse”.