Jon Cuyson’s art book, Seek and You Shall Find, challenges the viewer to determine the meaning of the work. The protagonist of the story appears to be the image of a “midnight sun,” weaving a linear connection with the constant yet constantly changing street signage. Ads, personals, wanted notes, and job offers, meaningless by themselves, assume a new significance when placed next to the constantly appearing image of the sun.
Here, contrasting allusions to meaningful and meaningless signage lead to two ideas: that the hypertextual iconography is intentionally reduced to a steady line, to a sense of unison in the reverberation of meaning, suggesting that if there is meaning, it is open- ended meaning, a meaning determined by random relationships and no closure. The meaning here is meaning without message, meaning not drawn from the signified, but from the signifier. Secondly, role shifting between viewer and artist takes place through the artist’s eye when he photographs his objects of interest from both distance and proximity. What is relevant here is not what is viewed, but simply the act of viewing.
