About
Signifiers for an uncertain world. Marfa, Texas.
Biography
Travis LeRoy Southworth (b. 1979, Honolulu) is an American conceptual artist working from the premise that every image is a system rather than a singular picture. The practice takes the operations that produce images, retouching gestures, interface symbols, corrective language, and treats them as the medium itself.
Correction, absence and repair appear as evidence of touch, labor and judgment, so that an image reads as a history rather than a seamless surface. There Will Be Signs turns that attention outward, from the surface of the image to the surfaces of public instruction.
Southworth grew up in a military family, came of age in the Southwest, and has spent much of a life on the road reading what passes by. The signs being made now feel like something all those miles have been pointing toward.
The Project
There Will Be Signs is a series of generative artworks and sign-based installations that treats signs as systems of meaning rather than objects of instruction. Rather than producing signs, it produces signifiers: works that occupy the visual language of signage while withholding any stable message. They sit somewhere between road sign, interface, monument and glyph, and they ask how symbols acquire authority, circulate, and shape the way we navigate both physical and networked worlds.
The title is deliberately ambiguous. It sounds prophetic, ominous, cinematic. It suggests revelation while leaving its source unresolved, echoing biblical language, protest slogans, weather warnings and roadside promises at once.
The generative half is built for the web in p5.js, combining language, glyphs, color, pattern and composition into signs that feel familiar but do not quite behave. Many begin with something direct, a phrase or instruction understood at a glance. Looking longer reveals another layer: smaller text, repeated marks, competing signals. What first offered direction becomes less certain.
Context
Marfa sits at an unusual intersection of desert roads, minimalist sculpture and now generative art. All three run through this project. Judd came to West Texas because the desert offered something museums could not, a sustained encounter with work, light, space and the indifference of the land. That landscape is itself a sign system: ranch gates, county road markers, hand-painted warnings, distances measured to places that may no longer exist.
From Judd the project takes context as inseparable from the object. From Ed Ruscha, the deadpan language of the American road held as image, commercial directness and poetic ambiguity in the same frame. From the Burma-Shave sequences, the idea that meaning accumulates through motion, repetition, and the empty distance between one sign and the next.
What the work finally asks is what happens when a sign loses its sender. When the institution behind the message has gone, the danger has passed, and the authority behind the directive no longer exists.
Selected
- Installation
October 2026, Art Blocks Marfa Weekend - Residency
Art Blocks × OpenSea, 2026 Marfa Artist Residency - Solo exhibitions
Below Grand, Undercurrent, Freight + Volume, Mixed Greens - Group exhibitions
Zurich Kunsthalle, Museum of Contemporary Digital Art, The Drawing Center, Chicago Cultural Center, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Trinity Church Museum - Press
The New York Times, Artsy, Basler Zeitung, Art Slant - Award
NYFA Fellowship in Photography, 2010 - Education
MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. BFA, University of Arizona