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There Will Be Signs: Signifiers for an Uncertain World
2026 Art Blocks × OpenSea | Marfa Artist Residency | Work-in-Progress


There Will Be Signs is a series of generative artworks and public sculptures that explores signs as systems of meaning rather than objects of instruction. Rather than producing signs, I create signifiers—works that occupy the visual language of signage while withholding stable messages. Existing somewhere between road sign, interface, monument, and glyph, they ask how symbols acquire authority, circulate through culture, and shape the way we navigate both physical and networked worlds.

The title is intentionally ambiguous. There Will Be Signs sounds prophetic, ominous, even cinematic. It suggests revelation while leaving its source unresolved. It echoes biblical language, protest slogans, weather warnings, and everyday roadside promises, remaining open to multiple interpretations. Each work functions simultaneously as an object and a signal, a symbol and a symptom, pointing beyond itself toward larger systems of communication, belief, and control.

Sign Sculptures

Concept renderings for physical sign installations in and around Marfa, Texas. A selection of these works is being developed for installation during Art Blocks Weekend, October 2026. Final locations, configurations, and phrasing will vary according to site, permissions, and fabrication.


SYSTEM

There Will Be Signs is a generative system that borrows the familiar language of public signage: road warnings, advertisements, civic instructions, symbols, and directional markers. Built for the web using p5.js, the work combines language, glyphs, colors, patterns, and compositions to create signs that feel familiar but don’t quite behave as expected.

Many of the works begin with something direct: a phrase, symbol, or instruction that can be understood at a glance. Looking longer reveals another layer. Smaller text, repeated marks, fragments of language, and competing signals begin to complicate the message. What first appears to offer direction becomes less certain, leaving the viewer somewhere between reading a sign and interpreting one.

Generative Images

Custom software, color, dimensions variable, generative, javascript, html
This project is still developing. Its images, text, and creative process may change as the work continues to take shape.

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ALL ACTIONS LOGGED ATTENTION REQUIRED BEGIN AGAIN OBJECT NOT AS SHOWN TOKEN REQUIRED YOU WILL BE DELETED
Symbolic compression and hierarchy

  • Introducing glyph overlays
  • Larger symbolic forms
  • Layered sign compositions
  • Varied text layouts


Development 0.02_080826

Language exploration

  • Sign structures
  • Typography
  • Institutional language
  • Subtle symbolic systems


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Expanding the Visual System

  • Phrase hatching and text systems
  • Expanded symbol vocabulary
  • New color palettes
  • Refined background systems



SITE

There Will Be Signs moves between landscape and screen, occupying both as different forms of public art. Across both, the project asks what happens when a sign loses its sender. When the institution behind the message disappears. When the danger has passed, the product is gone, and the authority behind the directive no longer exists.

Marfa sits at an unusual intersection of desert roads, minimalist sculpture, and now generative art. All three run through this project. I grew up in a military family, came of age in the Southwest, and have spent much of my life on the road, reading what passes by. The signs I am making now feel like something all those miles have been pointing toward.

Reference Images

Images 1-4: Donald Judd, 5-7: Ed Ruscha, 8-10: Burma Shave 

THE ROAD

Donald Judd came to Marfa because the West Texas desert offered something museums could not: a sustained encounter with work, light, space, and the vast indifference of the land. That landscape is also a sign system: ranch gates, county road markers, hand-painted warnings, directional arrows, and distances measured in miles to places that may or may not still exist.

There Will Be Signs emerges from several overlapping lineages. Judd’s work established context as inseparable from the object, where space, distance, light, and duration become part of the experience of the work. Ed Ruscha turned the deadpan language of the American road into image, holding commercial directness and poetic ambiguity in the same frame. And the Burma-Shave sequences that once punctuated American highways transformed roadside advertising into a kind of distributed vernacular poetry, where meaning accumulated through motion, repetition, timing, and the empty distances between signs.

These histories converge in a landscape already filled with instructions, markers, warnings, and symbols. There Will Be Signs enters that existing language not by making signs that tell us where to go, but by making signifiers whose meaning remains uncertain.