Editor’s note: This story is part of The Dallas Morning News’ coverage of the 2024 total solar eclipse. For more, visit dallasnews.com/eclipse.
You may already know that on April 8, a total solar eclipse will arc across the United States, running from southern Texas up through Illinois to Maine. People have even been booking flights and reserving hotel rooms along the path of totality to get a good viewing spot.
And now it seems the celestial event is trying to nab drivers’ attention, just like personal injury lawyers. Five billboards have gone up around Dallas featuring sizable images that appear to be eclipses.
The billboards are part of a multifaceted project called View Finder from Dallas Contemporary. They feature cosmic images by Dallas artist Brian Fridge — they’re photo stills from a short film he’s made. Fridge is known for using analog camera techniques — no digital effects — to create photos of shadowy, swirling, galactic shapes. But he does this with small-scale, tabletop events, like defrosting ice.
When the idea for the View Finder project was hatched, Dallas Contemporary deputy director Lucia Simek said she thought of Fridge. His works have been exhibited in Turin, Italy, at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and at the Whitney Biennial in New York.
“I knew he made these cosmic-seeming films,” she said. “And his take on it has been beautiful.”
View Finder is one of more than 100 projects across the country funded by the Simons Foundation. The New York-based foundation supports research and engaging the public with science.
The Simons Foundation put out a call for submissions, Simek said, and Dallas Contemporary devised a multipronged approach. In addition to the billboards, it will screen Fridge’s short film at the Contemporary, NorthPark Center, the Texas Theatre and other Dallas locations. And it will publish a limited-run edition of Fridge’s images.
Each of the billboards shows a different phase of an eclipse. Three are along U.S. Highway 67. Taking 67 north from Cedar Hill, drivers can see what looks like the moon progressively moving across the sun. If a driver then heads up the Dallas North Tollway, a billboard featuring a total eclipse comes into view, just south of the exit for Lemmon Avenue.
April’s eclipse will be total. The moon will completely block the sun. That’s why the Simons Foundation’s multistate effort is called In the Path of Totality.
In comparison, last October, we saw an annular eclipse, which doesn’t block out the sun entirely.
Simek said the Contemporary’s project is not intended to educate people about the eclipse. It’s more just to make them aware of it.
“I know there are people booking hotels in Dallas. It’s kind of a big deal,” she said. But despite the media attention, “there were people last October [during the annular eclipse] who were like, ‘What’s happening right now? Why does the sky look so strange?’ So as much as we imagine it as something arresting, I don’t think many people are thinking about it. So this’ll make people pause and think about it.”
The highway billboards, she said, may well have an effect on passersby similar to an eclipse. They’ll encounter the sudden appearance of an arresting image.
The Simons Foundation website for In the Path of Totality lists many of the projects across 13 states intended for celebrating the eclipse, educating people about it or just holding safe viewings.
Locations include museums and planetariums like the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas, the Sci-Tech Discovery Center in Frisco and the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History. There are also viewings and activities at libraries, universities and festivals.
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