This project is based on the original promotional poster that accompanied Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 film Eyes Wide Shut. The proposed billboard retains the basic design elements of the original film poster but key attributes – such as the depiction of the primary actors’ likenesses – are deleted altogether. Substituted in place of the poster’s original body text is a written admonition lifted from a pivotal scene in the film’s narrative. The written warning, received by Tom Cruise’s character in the film, is superimposed instead of the original ad-copy, using the same typeface – Futura Extra Bold Condensed – and color-palette as the original poster text.

By displacing the written admonition from its original narrative context, my aim in this project, is to shift the institutional voice into a different pictorial register, by divorcing it from the fictional attributes assigned to it within the context of Kubrick’s mise-en-scene – and allowing for alternate readings of the text, here disguised anew as an ominous and cryptic mass-media message. Coincidentally, artists Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger are known for their use of mass media messages as well as the typeface Futura, generally regarded as one of the most over-used typefaces in advertising history, but also Kubrick’s preferred typeface.

My interest in Kubrick’s oeuvre extends to projects I’ve undertaken previously (see, for instance, Schijn series), and stems primarily from his sustained engagement with illuminating and undermining the inconsistencies contained and perpetuated in hegemonic thought, as these dichotomies are manifested in his films.

The film’s original poster depicted formerly-married couple Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, portraying a married couple onscreen, reflected in a silver-framed mirror. Here, Kubrick deftly cast art and reality as deliberate reflections of one another. My aims, in the realization of this project, are similar — attempting to reframe the text by dislocating it, thereby opening up its narrative potential, but also anchoring it anew within a different cultural context.

For this reason, I’ve opted to retain the original image of the framed mirror, as the primary pictorial element within the composition, but removed the actors’ reflected likenesses, so as to render even more ambiguous the ominous nature of the latent pictorial logic implicit in the written invocation.

As a visual non-sequitur in the urban landscape, yet retaining enough visual queues to potentially locate the billboard’s original source material, my aim is to engage the public-at-large in an open-ended questioning of the mechanized consensus implicit in cultural hegemonies.