LA Street Signs as Art: How Found Objects Become Fine Art Substrates
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LA Street Signs as Art: How Found Objects Become Fine Art Substrates
There's a specific kind of object that's everywhere and invisible at the same time. Traffic signs — the No Left Turn, the Stop, the One Way, the Do Not Enter — line every street in every American city. You've looked at them thousands of times without seeing them. They're so embedded in the visual infrastructure of daily life that they've become functionally transparent. You read the instruction and look past the object.
Artists have been looking at these objects differently for decades. Not as instructions but as materials — as physical objects with specific histories, specific material properties, and specific cultural weight that makes them interesting substrates for art-making. The street sign as found object has a lineage in contemporary art that runs from Duchamp's readymades through Jean-Michel Basquiat's found surface works through the street art practice of a generation of artists who grew up treating the city's infrastructure as raw material.
At Abiss, the reflective aluminum street sign is the substrate for our most significant fine art work. Here's why that choice is as intentional as everything else about the practice.
The Found Object Tradition
The concept of the found object — the objet trouvé — in fine art begins with Marcel Duchamp's readymades in the early 20th century. Duchamp's Fountain (1917), a commercially produced urinal submitted to an art exhibition under a pseudonym, posed a question that the art world is still answering: if an artist designates an object as art, does it become art? What is the relationship between the artist's intention and the object's original function? Does context — the gallery, the frame, the designation — transform the object's meaning?
The readymade tradition established the found object as a legitimate fine art material and opened up a century of practice in which artists have worked with objects chosen for their existing cultural weight rather than for the neutral substrate qualities of traditional art materials.
What makes the found object interesting as art material is precisely what makes it complicated: it arrives with meaning already attached. A blank canvas has no prior associations. A No Left Turn sign has decades of civic authority, of the relationship between the individual and the state's regulation of movement, of the specific visual language of urban infrastructure design. When an artist uses that object as a substrate, all of that prior meaning becomes part of the work — available to be reinforced, subverted, ignored, or transformed, but always present.
Why Street Signs Specifically
Street signs occupy a specific position in the urban visual environment that makes them particularly resonant as art substrates.
They're authoritative. Traffic signs are the state's most direct imposition on individual behavior in public space. They tell you what you can and cannot do, where you can and cannot go. Their authority is total — legally binding, visually commanding, designed to be obeyed without question. That authority is present in the object even when it's removed from its original context.
They're designed to be seen and not seen. Traffic sign design is a specialized discipline aimed at maximum legibility and minimum conscious engagement. The signs should be read instantly and forgotten — processed at the edge of attention as you navigate the street. Their visual design is calibrated for this specific kind of imperceptible visibility.
They're made from interesting materials. Reflective aluminum — the standard material for traffic signs — has specific optical properties that make it a compelling substrate for serigraphy. The retroreflective sheeting that makes signs visible at night creates a surface that interacts with light in ways that paint on canvas or paper doesn't. Ink printed on a reflective aluminum surface catches light differently at different angles. Color relationships that are fixed on paper become dynamic on a reflective substrate.
They're urban infrastructure. The traffic sign is one of the most legible symbols of the city as a designed and managed system. It's the physical manifestation of the urban planning apparatus — the city's attempt to organize movement through space. For a brand whose core concept is "the city is the source material," the street sign isn't a found object chosen arbitrarily. It's the most concentrated and specific expression of what the city is.
The Material Properties
Working with reflective aluminum street signs as a fine art substrate requires understanding the material's specific properties and how they interact with screen-printed ink.
The reflective surface
Standard traffic signs use microprismatic retroreflective sheeting bonded to an aluminum panel. This sheeting is designed to return light toward its source — the reason signs are bright in headlights at night. The microprism structure creates a surface texture that's invisible to the naked eye but affects how ink sits on the surface and how it interacts with light.
Ink printed on this surface doesn't behave the way it does on paper or fabric. The retroreflective layer underneath changes the optical character of the ink — transparent layers catch and return light differently, color relationships shift depending on the viewing angle and lighting conditions. A CMY process serigraph on reflective aluminum looks different in direct sunlight than in artificial light, different head-on than at an angle. The work is optically dynamic in a way that flat substrates aren't.
The non-porous surface
Paper and fabric absorb ink to some degree, creating a bond between the ink and the substrate fiber. Aluminum is completely non-porous — ink sits entirely on the surface, bonded only by adhesion. This requires primer treatment before printing to ensure the ink bonds correctly, and it means the ink layer has a distinct presence on the surface rather than being partially embedded in it. The ink is on the sign in a way that's different from ink on paper.
The substrate's existing marks
Found street signs come with their own history. Scuffs, weathering, previous graffiti removed imperfectly, the shadow of a sticker, the specific patina of a sign that has been outside for years — all of this is present on the substrate before any ink is applied. These existing marks become part of the work. They're not flaws to be hidden. They're evidence of the object's prior life, brought into dialogue with the artist's marks.
The Cultural Collision
When a hand-pulled serigraph is printed on a street sign, two visual languages collide in the same object.
The first is the official visual language of civic infrastructure — the authoritative, legible, command-oriented design of traffic signs. This language is designed to regulate behavior, to impose order on the city's movement, to make the state's directives visible and unavoidable.
The second is the fine art visual language of the serigraph — the artist's mark, the layered ink, the image that doesn't tell you what to do but asks you to look and think. This language is designed to create a specific kind of attention, to use visual experience to generate meaning that can't be reduced to instruction.
The collision of these two languages in a single object is where the work lives. The sign's original authority doesn't disappear when the serigraph is printed on it. The serigraph's meaning doesn't simply override the sign's function. Both remain present, in tension, producing a third thing that neither would produce alone.
A No Left Turn sign that has been printed with a three-layer CMY reduction serigraph is no longer primarily a traffic sign. But it's also not a sign that's been erased and replaced with an image. It's both simultaneously. The regulatory command and the artistic mark occupy the same object, and that occupation is the work.
The Street Art Lineage
Abiss's use of street sign substrates connects directly to a street art lineage that has used urban infrastructure as raw material for decades.
Street artists have always worked with what the city provides. Wheatpaste on concrete. Paint on steel shutters. Stickers on utility boxes. The city's surfaces have been the canvas for a practice that claims public space as legitimate art space. The found object — the surface that already exists in the public environment rather than being manufactured for art-making — is central to street art's relationship to the city.
Working with street signs as found object substrates extends this tradition into the fine art serigraph context. It takes the street art impulse — using the city's materials, working with the existing visual environment rather than imposing on it — and applies it through a craft process with fine art print rigor.
The result occupies multiple contexts simultaneously: it's a fine art print, a found object sculpture, a street art-influenced work, and a document of a specific urban object's transformation. It belongs in a gallery. It belongs in a collection. And its origin — in the visual culture of the street, in the materials of the city — is visible in every aspect of how it looks.
The Abiss Practice
Every Abiss street sign work begins with the sign itself. The specific object — its dimensions, its surface character, its existing marks, its history — shapes what gets printed on it. The found substrate is not a neutral material that happens to be aluminum. It's a specific object with a specific identity that the work is made in response to.
The CMY process layering we use on these substrates is chosen specifically for how it interacts with the reflective surface. The transparency of process ink layers allows the reflective substrate to participate in the color relationships rather than being covered by opaque color. Light moves through the ink and returns from the reflective surface, making the color dynamic in ways that don't exist in flat substrate printing.
The city is the source material. The street sign is the city's most concentrated and specific object. Printing on it is the most direct possible expression of what Abiss is about.
View available street sign works at abissapparel.com.
Abiss Apparel is an LA-based streetwear and fine art brand producing heavyweight screen-printed apparel and limited edition hand-pulled serigraphs. Shop at abissapparel.com and follow @abissapparel.