“Las Vegas Walk” is one manifestation of a larger work titled “100 Walkers.” This action (designed for anywhere from one to 100 performers) aims to interrupt the daily life of the city by inserting startling incongruities into familiar spaces.

In “Las Vegas Walk,” a single performer, dressed in a suit and bowler hat and wearing a sandwich board with a unique combination of text and image on front and back, walked several different neighborhoods in and around the center of Las Vegas. Subverting a form designed primarily for advertising and proselytizing by “selling” nothing, the image and text resonate with ambiguity and invite multiple interpretations and associations. Further, as they are collaged into the fabric of the city itself, they create new associations and shift the way the city is experienced by people moving through their daily lives.

To date, nine walks have been performed, in urban environments such as Las Vegas and Los Angeles, as well as in more remote, unpopulated areas such as Death Valley. In each case the action is conceived as a “drawing” as well as a means to engage the aesthetic, quotidian, and historic nature of each site. The sandwich boards draw on various lexica, both verbal and visual, that range from urban landscapes to include London street calls, “sounds” from comic books to hand gestures appropriated from European paintings. I have been asked how I expect to make any sense by bringing together so many differing things. My response, without wishing to be glib, is that it’s not sense I’m after. Rather, I seek to create a replica, in microcosm, of the world itself, an environment riddled with ambiguities, contradictions, and interruptions.