Perhaps you've noticed several odd billboards around the Valley with enigmatic phrases printed on photographs of a blue sky dotted with wispy clouds. "The first time being picked last," reads one stationed prominently on the Strip, just north of the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign. Another, on the Desert Inn connector, proclaims in Spanish, "La primera vez que me perdi en un pais extrano," or "The first time being lost in a strange land."
More than likely, you've been conditioned by postmodern marketing to expect one of those all-too-precious ad campaigns that prey on curiosity. Surely, in another week or so, we'll learn that the billboards are hawking—of course!—high-rise condo units.
No, they're public art, the kind placed in common spaces for common experience. The field has expanded in recent decades beyond sculptures in plazas and statues in parks to include murals on highway soundproofing walls, painted cows on street corners, and yes, billboards. The "first time" quartet seen on billboards around the Valley relays memories of artist Robert Wysocki.
The assistant professor of sculpture won a New Investigators Award, a grant program open to all UNLV faculty, and used nearly $10,000 for three months of billboard display from Lamar Outdoor Advertising, which Wysocki credits for interest and support beyond its commercial gain. Lamar has moved the four designs, printed on huge nylon sheets, around the Valley, although one was installed on Interstate-15 in St. George, "for the poor truckers heading for Utah," Wysocki quips.
As it happens, that one is the most personal of the four. Its legend, "The first time having cherry pie at school and at home on the same day," refers, says Wysocki, to a kindergarten coincidence that impelled his young mind to suspect a conspiracy between the cafeteria staff and his mother. The fourth, "The first time walking home alone," is like the first two, remembered moments that might be widely shared.
All four can be seen also at
www.thescarecrow.com. They are drawn from a catalog of roughly 4,500 "first times" Wysocki has compiled since 1996. "I started a list of big things that had happened in my life," he says. "I think everyone keeps catalogs of their life." But this is no scrapbook of snapshots and concert tickets. FTP, for First Time Experiences, is an art project in itself, a way to identify patterns in experience. "In terms of what all of my work is about, I'm really interested in how I became who I am."
It's notable that the items on Wysocki's list are firsts, implying on one hand that every experience might be repeated and on the other that each experience is unique. He's become an uncle several times for the "first time" because each niece or nephew is a distinct person, Wysocki explains. Also, the memories are not listed in order of occurrence, but in order of memory. Some events enter the order soon after happening, such as becoming a father recently, and others only on recall long afterward, such as "the first time kissing a girl named M."
Wysocki compiled the list into a book once but found "it was too immediate, too accessible." He recently had the listed printed on a 10-foot-by-25-foot sheet, a billboard of sorts, for a gallery show in Chico, California. The list also will be shown in the 2005 Nevada Triennial at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, opening July 16.
The billboards, up for another month, are intended to resonate without reference to Wysocki specifically. "I didn't want it to be about me," he says. "I wanted something that was accessible to everyone."