Artist Matthew Hebert’s found text poetry invites travelers to reexamine language that is all around us. To create his artwork, Hebert spent time touring the airport, documenting interesting phrases and words that grace the walls and signage throughout the terminals. He then cut and paste phrases to alter their meaning, and recomposed selected words into an original, absurdist poem. Read in a new context and scale, directional or instructional signage becomes playful or even silly. By reproducing some text as flat and some in three dimensions, the artist also embeds a poem-within-a-poem for passengers to discover. Though much of the language will be familiar to travelers, the last line of the poem offers a tongue-in-cheek comment to make clear that this is in fact artwork, and not to be read as official airport signage.

Terminal 2 East, Post-Security, Gate 24