OUR TOWN:
Clouds, Forge Road S.E.
w e’ve looked at billboards from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow... we really don’t know billboards at all. Or clouds. Or, especially, billboards of clouds. This nebulous advertisement sits/floats on the south side of Glenmore Trail near the intersection with Blackfoot. We know not what it’s for or who put it there. What we do know is that it’s been there for quite a spell (since June, at least), and that it provides a mighty pretty respite for drivers lost in the concrete labyrinth that wends around this pocket of industry in southeast Calgary.
A-1 Cement Contractors, for instance, sits directly beneath the sign’s cosmic fluffiness. Or at least it used to: the cement company’s former digs are now up for lease, and the company itself recently moved to slightly more southerly climes on Burbank Road. No word on whether it was a rent increase or the imminent alien invasion that drove the contractors away.
Photographer George Webber’s take on the sign is a bit less X-Files, a bit more surrealist. The billboard reminded him of works by the late Belgian artist René Magritte, who may be best known for his painting of a pipe accompanied by the words “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” (“This is not a pipe”). But the witty artist also painted a series of surreal clouds in the 1950s and ’60s. Magritte’s clouds, which sit in giant Champagne glasses, hold aloft men in bowler hats, and float alongside levitating boulders, may well have inspired the creator of this “particularly artful coalescing,” as Webber refers to the billboard’s dreamlike sky.
Still, at the end of the day, a billboard is a billboard, and this one is presumably lying in wait not for an art collector but for a paying advertiser, who will likely plaster it over with a considerably less engaging photo of a Chevy truck or an exhortation to take advantage of a terrific deal on pants.
In the more metaphysical meantime, we leave you to ponder the mysterious origins and significance of this little piece of the sky as possibly seen through a Magrittean lens. But don’t expect to come up with any definite answers. When asked to explain the meaning of one of his obscure paintings, the Belgian surrealist is reported to have said: “It does not mean anything because mystery means nothing … it is unknowable.” Even if you look at it from both sides now. S