Things change. The perception and non-perception of the churn in our surroundings, the sudden appearance of graffiti, or a high rise, or the disappearance of a neighbourhood shop that had always seemed to be on every mental map, mark particularly urban time signatures. Facades twinkle from year to year as the endeavors they present or conceal, thrive, struggle, shutter, and re-open; art gallery, boutique, vape shop… This while we live, go about, chasing schedules, following tugs of desire.

The visual often holds sway in the city, and the way we read it tells us something collectively about how to navigate its reality. Here is as old as the eye can see. Older of course. The atrocity of the past repeats in the ways we walk and cautiously mingle.

The failure to signify evenly foils my utopian attempts at communal telepathy, which inevitably fragment according to hierarchies of understanding and legibility. Applied to a text, the gimmick of the lenticular lens, that its facets cause the words to shift according to each viewer’s relative spatial and temporal perspective only produces more ambivalent messaging. But what was I thinking? At the end of the day, I hoped these were only the narrowest aspects of the fulness of our differences. We make the city. Change things.