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Kim Beck’s trompe l’oeil billboard looks so “real” that a visitor to the museum may question its placement. A second and closer look will reveal that this out-of-place sign lacks real dimension and is in fact a visual illusion, a trompe l’oeil (which literally means to “trick the eye”) art object.

Today billboards are considered a visual blight by many, scorned for their transformation of a public space into a commercial one. But, for many others, the billboard is viewed as a nostalgic object, a poignant remnant of the industrial landscape of a bygone era. The artist has transformed this mundane object into a theatrical piece of sculpture, hovering between abstraction and reality, presented for our delectation as an aesthetic or formal structure, which many may find has an intrinsic beauty of its own.