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Windows GallerySIGNSColor Photographs by: Shandoor Hassan Curated by: Jovana Stokic Shandor Hassan's signs exist first as pure emanations of light against a background of equally pure darkness. They hit us as object and as meaning at the same time, and we are forced to vacillate between reading them and simply seeing them as a seductive visual experience. Ambiguous messages are created in oddly disjunctive typography, and in the formal glowing structure floating in empty space: "Wendy's; Pick-Up Window; Go Wild/With our New/Wild Mountain Combos!/GoodYear/Gemini" reads one - it's surreal. These signs are unquestionably icons of an American journey, calling out to the driver to stop, get gas, rent a room, take refreshment, and to take notice, above all. On the one hand Shandor Hassan's images are placeless, utopic in the literal sense of the word; yet if you look closely, you see veiled visual hints of a specific environment: a basic housefront, a ragged lawn, the fitful glow of a lamppost, that, along with the signs themselves, can only exist within a self-consciously national imagination. Despite their formal eloquence, the photos are humble in the American grain, following the tradition of such recorders of the American scene as Walker Evans, or more recently, color photographers like Joel Meyrowitz or Richard Misrach, and the minimalist pop of Ed Ruscha. It is this acceptance or things as they are on the highwayscape of this country that, paradoxically, makes the signs strange, gives them an uncanny sense of life, light-born, as Shandor brings them out of the space of darkness into spectacular being. 
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