A Post No Bills notice is an assertion that a wall is sacrosanct, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of the city, where signage both legal and illegal accumulates like wild foliage. Each surface in the urban environment is a potential palimpsest, where message upon message tells its tale as days, seasons, and years come and go.

The signs that populate the walls of a city are akin to tattoos. They are dispatches of personality and intent, be they graffiti or guerilla marketing. A Post No Bills notice is a futile gesture meant to stem the flow of the city expressing itself. In this way, the city dweller who wants their voice to be heard might take each instance of Post No Bills as not just an invitation, but even as a challenge.

In this exhibition, four artists react and act upon the idea of the Post No Bills notice. With a variety of mediums and mindsets, we see a small sampling of the chorus of voices that populate New York City vying to be heard, fighting to be seen, and posting bills wherever and however they can.

A City In Flux
– By Jesse Pearson

Each artist in Post No Bills is a New Yorker finding different ways to represent the environment that surrounds them. In their art, we found a gamut of approaches and surprising ways to think of the mutable nature of this city. This is because a Post No Bills notice is two things at once: A dogmatic restriction and a harbinger of coming change. Behind each utterance of “Post No Bills” a kind of evolution is at work.

The photographer Fumi Nagasaka interacts with the diamond-windows found in construction site walls, but with a series of whimsical portraits. By placing us, the viewer, inside the construction site and having her subjects look in upon us, a reversal is performed. We are the spectacle behind the hastily- erected wall. These curious faces, these people who were before this moment our neighbors, are given the power to scrutinize us. But this dynamic, in Nagasaka’s deft hands, possesses a playful, friendly quality.

Hidenori Ishii not only recreates the walls that enclose construction sites, but also addresses the diamond- shaped windows cut into those walls—the very loci on which we find Post No Bills notices—by creating pieces that plug up the vantage points that have been offered to us, the small concessions meant to appease us with a few of the coming future. Instead, Ishii presents us with his own constructions, which mimic the accumulation of signage, graffiti, and messaging that appears on urban walls.

In his noirish, figurative paintings of city scenes, Jeremy Nakamura evokes the hidden dramas of the urban public space. A group of workmen arrayed in a human tableau on a closed-off sidewalk… the sudden greenery of a lush tree peeking over a high wall… a worker opening a door in a construction-site wall replete with Post No Bills notices finds a strange portal to a verdant paradise... In these mysterious imaginings, Nakamura peels back the top layer of the city to reveal the magic beneath.

Junko Yoda’s paintings, with their texturally intriguing surfaces, cast a moody eye upon TriBeCa. By often training her wondering and somehow critical gaze at the strange structure of 56 Leonard Street—the tallest building in the neighborhood, known to locals as the Jenga Tower—Yoda interacts with this uncompromising structure that, like it or not, dominates the skyline and sightlines of her daily life.