I installed a series of six texts in empty signs throughout the city of Halifax in Canada. Photographs of the site interventions were shown in an art exhibition at the city’s Anna Leonowens Gallery. The phrases that I wrote were deliberately elliptical, designed to transform commercial signs into sites where sub-texts of urban space, poetic fragments, could come to the fore.

I installed one of the texts – which read Pioneer Frontier Explode My Heart – in the marquee signage of derelict cinema that was scheduled for demolition. A few weeks later, an article appeared in the local newspaper in which a journalist lamented the loss of the building and its enigmatic sign whose origins had been a source of curiosity and mystery to locals for years, he recalled.