Artist Billboard presents commissions by diverse international artists on an outdoor billboard-like hoarding at The SPACE, St John’s Road, St Leonards on Sea, East Sussex.

The works can be viewed from pavement and street level from summer 2021 to summer 2022.

Artist Billboard’s second commission (August-September 2021) was:

Parades by Pierre Yves Brest

Pierre-Yves Brest is based in Lille and his photographic practice is supported by La Malterie, Lille where his studio is based. From 2001-2019 he was a photography lecturer at L’École supérieure d’art de Cambrai. Currently Brest is Head of the Photography Department at l’Académie Royale des Beaux-arts de Bruxelles. Since 2007, he has exhibited at FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Kunsthalle, Erfurt (D), Château Coquelle and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dunkerque and Gallery Lock In, Brighton.

Pierre-Yves Brest frequently works in his studio where he creates curious staged tableaux that willingly defy the observer’s gaze and expectations.

‘The shots are close-up, frontal, often filling the entire frame. On each image, a figure, always the same, truncated, immobilised like a butterfly collection: the photographer, with around him objects of a transitory character, sometimes incongruous: privileged theatre of emergence, echo chamber where actions multiply that count for nothing or very little. In the darkness of the studio, the photographed photographer has every capacity to recompose the image, he slides vertically from an invisible plane, he arranges the accident and the unstable surface effects; actor and director, he arranges a whole film world without depth, creates a flat layout. Everything is potentially fluid but never imprecise. The objects and materials present in the images are those that the photographer collects, collects and combines.

The images were initially imagined to be presented in urban JCD advertising panels (Decaux lollipops). In this particular context, the artist’s body seems to have interfered with the narrow and constrained space of the billboard, like an intruder in the contemporary public and commercial space.’

The images are available as posters in 120 x 176cm format but can also be framed and presented under glass in 80 x 120cm format.

Visit our Projects section to view other Artist Billboard commissions.

Artist Billboard has been realised with the support of Hastings and St Leonards Foreshore Charitable Trust.