Special Advertising Section is a print intervention by Jamie Hilder in the pilot issue of Public Art Dialogue, a new journal published by Routledge.
Public Art Dialogue launch February 9 - 12, 2011
College Art Association 99th Annual Conference, New York
Project description: Special Advertising Section is a series of full-page images that replicate magazine tourism ads through the use of digital stills drawn from Hilder’s public art project Downtown Ambassadors (2006 – 2010). Downtown Ambassador (2006 – 2010) engages public performance, social sculpture, video documentation, and photography as a response to the inscription of a private, commercial ideology onto public space. It incorporates, as its central device, the City of Vancouver’s Downtown Ambassadors program, a private security and hospitality force operated by the Downtown Vancouver Business Improvement Association.
Through the strategic implementation of performance and documentation, this work provides a broad critique of the ways in which city agencies widely co-opt public art as a marketable brand to increase tourism revenue. In the context of Public Art Dialogue Special Advertising Section provides a trajectory of public art practice as it has evolved from commemorative content to non-commemorative sculpture to more recent ephemeral strategies that draw on the temporary nature of performance and new media. As a discrete artwork, Special Advertising Section is a work of public of art in itself.
Public Art Dialogue is a new scholarly journal published bi-annually by Routledge. Click thumbnails below to view larger images from the suite of "ads." The video featured here is an excerpt from Hilder's Downtown Ambassadors that indicidentally features his arrest for "impersonating a downtown ambassador"--the artist's online installation of Downtown Ambassador for Audain Gallery can be viewed here http://audaingallery.ca/projects/jamie-hilder/. A full project statement is included in Public Art Dialogue and available here: Download Project Statement.
Jamie Hilder lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. His work engages performance and social critique. His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Artspeak Gallery and Charles H. Scott Gallery. A web-based video of Downtown Ambassadors was commissioned for the exhibition Coming Soon at The Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University. A recent Fulbright scholar at Stanford University, he completed his doctoral dissertation on the International Concrete Poetry Movement in the English Department at the University of British Columbia in 2010.
