One of the images in the Pittsburgh Signs Project is Jennifer Baron's photograph of the South Hills Motel sign, which was demolished recently. Click photo for larger image.

Sometimes the things we take for granted say the most about us.

Consider, for example, the signs that crowd our visual landscape, announcing everything from highway detours to a church supper or a trendy bistro. Individually, they transmit information about something specific. Considered en masse, as is being done by the Pittsburgh Signs Project, they speak to our culture, present and past.

This egalitarian project, which has been in existence for a little more than a year, lives at a Web site, www.pittsburghsigns.org, where, at last check, it displays more than 250 entries taken by more than 60 photographers, and invites more comers. But it's also the subject of an exhibition at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.

The project was the idea of Mark Stroup, who was inspired by Internet images of Denver signs. He -- and the other project editors Jennifer Baron, Greg Langel, and Elizabeth Perry -- set out to record history (some photographed signs have been destroyed in the project's short life span) and also draw attention to and arrive at some definition of the visual environment.

In the exhibition, seven large panels, made by project participants using Filmmakers' Epson 6000 printer, display rows of images in an eclectic grid. "South Hills Bowl" (the last letter limply misaligned) shares space with Arby's neon hat and a hand-painted "Pyrohi Friday."

Two images, Stroup's "Gone Krogering" and Baron's "I Believe in Neon" -- given individual attention and reproduced along with comments by their photographers -- show the complex interpretations all signs potentially have.

Iroquois Building sign in Oakland was photographed this year by Greg Langel. Click photo for larger image.

"Signs are landmarks and touchstones for stories" Stroup writes of his October picture of a sign on a vacant Kroger store in Shadyside. The history that he presents of the building that housed the grocery store is physical and societal, including a labor strike and shifts in food marketing trends. Soon after he took the picture, the building was demolished. "A visible source of our history has become absent," he writes.

While Stroup realized that the destruction of the sign he recorded was inevitable, Baron's was like a member of the family that she'd visit occasionally when in the area. So it was a shock, she writes, when she drove past its site in October and it was gone.

A native of the region, Baron writes that she became fascinated with "roadside culture" as a child driving with her family on roads such as the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Route 30. Her "habit-forming, sign-centric, photo journalistic tendencies took root" in her 20s as she traveled across country in a van with her band.

The neon of Baron's photograph's title once lit the late '40s era South Hills Motel sign along Route 51 in Pleasant Hills. Having survived bypasses and road widening, the motel was finally falling prey to modernization by a new owner who was "indifferent" to any sentimental or historic loss. The hope of saving it for a venue such as the newly formed American Sign Museum in Cincinnati was dashed, Baron writes, when the contractor described the sign's "violent dismemberment" before it was hauled to a scrap yard.

At an on-site computer, visitors may visit the project Web site to discover such entries as the vine-encroached, defunct "Pigs' Foot BBQ," which has a link to a recipe for "barbecued pigs feet." Links to other sign culture enthusiasts are also provided.

All signs are not created equal, and while the mix gives the project's display vitality, at some point one could imagine categories being formed to help keep track and as an evaluative procedure. There's also a commercial aspect to consider: At what point does reproducing restaurant signs, for example, leave "commercial archaeology" as Baron deems it, and become advertising, if indeed it does.

Photographic approaches vary from deadpan documentary, to use of artistic cropping and perspective, to high-art aesthetic considerations that add conceptual layering.

In any event, the project is laudable and a prime example of an inventive application of new technology to facilitate something that would have been much more exclusive, difficult and expensive if carried out in the recent past.

"Signs" continues through Dec. 17 at 477 Melwood Ave., North Oakland. Gallery hours are noon to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Admission is free. Information: 412-681-5449 or visit www.pghfilmmakers.org.

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Cuba and visas

At 2 p.m. today at the Mattress Factory Museum, 500 Sampsonia Way, North Side, executive/artistic director Barbara Luderowski and curator of exhibitions Michael Olijnyk will speak on "Overcoming Hurdles: Organizing New Installations, Artists in Residence: Cuba," regarding the current exhibition. Only one of the 11 exhibiting artists was able to secure a visa to travel to Pittsburgh. Generally artists spend between one and several weeks at the museum developing their artworks. Free with museum admission. For information, call 412-231-3169 or visit www.mattress.org.

At 5 p.m. tomorrow poet Huang Xiang will unveil his "House Poem," hand-calligraphed on the facade of his "Poet's House" at 408 Sampsonia Way, followed by a short reading. Xiang is housed by Pittsburgh's branch of City of Asylum, a program that provides refuge to creative writers under threat in their home countries, and the event is sponsored by the Mattress Factory. RSVP at 412-321-2190 or coapgh@yahoo.com.