What do those signs at YLW mean?

Next time you’re at Kelowna International Airport cast your gaze above the check-in area.

It’s pretty hard not to notice a series of seemingly common road signs in their conventional yellow and black. But on closer inspection they’re not normal, and they’re deliberately juxtaposed with what it means to follow signs while seeing, being and living in our real world and its rules.

The signs, accompanied by terms like: ‘Caution: pseudo-intellectual drivel at centerline’, or ‘ways of seeing’ and ‘ways of being’ highlight Okanagan artist Steve Mennie’s comedic but mildly menacing take on the signs and our existence.

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Mennie told Kelowna10 playfully as he looked upon his work being displayed outside a gallery; in this case at YLW. “What do you make of it? It’s kind of weird.”

The large-scale paintings in the 40-foot-long exhibition space at the airport organized by the Kelowna Art Gallery are an exhibit Mennie calls, Semiotically Speaking, and highlights his interest in semiotics, or the study of signs and symbols.

“We negotiate reality by reading signs. Some of them are really explicit and simple …[but] our language is a more complex system of signs.”

“As a high realist painter, I’m always looking at reality …what’s real, what’s unreal. These signs are distinctly just to guide us through countryside and such, [but] our language guides us through life.”

Given his tongue-in-cheek reworking of the signs, he said artists need to be sillier.

“People get too nervous about artists. They think they’re too serious. They should be sillier,” he said.

But there's also a deeper, more serious authoritarian meaning in the words displayed alongside a school bus for example. 'Take a seat ... watch your step.'

“That’s why I like this particular context for showing them. This airport is a three-dimensional semiotic. You know why you’re here, to fly somewhere or to meet someone. And when you put [these signs] up here it’s unexpected, it’s a whole different context.”

Mennie’s works are held in both public and private collections across Canada. He has twice been commissioned by Canada Post to design commemorative postage stamps.

More about the exhibit can be found here.