Dennis Levesque: New York Was Yesterday — Dennis Levesque

Please join us Thursday, October 15th from 6 - 8 pm for the opening reception of New-York based artist Dennis Levesque’s exhibition ‘New York Was Yesterday ’, an ongoing collection of more than 2,160 "WET PAINT" signs gathered from New York City subway stations since 2021 and exhibited in the gallery as an immersive installation.

‘New York Was Yesterday’ is an ongoing collection of more than 2,160 “WET PAINT” signs removed from New York City subway stations since 2021. Through collecting, cataloging, mapping, and painting, the artist transforms an overlooked object of urban maintenance into an evolving archive of the city and a record of personal movement through it. Each sign marks an attempt to cover what came before. As layers of fresh paint accumulate, the traces of the past are concealed but never entirely erased.

The collection’s maps and charts reveal patterns of distribution and travel, while three anatomically precise paintings distinguish the signs’ three known visual types. Altered signs and contributions from friends introduce unexpected encounters and individual histories into the archive. Balancing systematic documentation with personal observation, ‘New York Was Yesterday’ considers how ordinary objects acquire meaning through attention. What begins as a mechanical act of collecting becomes a meditation on memory, urban change, and the histories embedded beneath the city’s surfaces.

In Levesque’s words, “Collecting these “WET PAINT” signs represents a time and place in New York. Each sign is a bookmark in my life, a way to acknowledge the good and the bad of fleeting moments. The exercise of finding signs has become quite mechanical. A passive activity as I go about my day, yet it keeps me in a state of observation, so I won’t miss the red letters appearing around a pole or on a faraway wall in a station. The signs possess no inherent value. The act of noticing and understanding creates the value. In seemingly mundane moments, do you have the time to put in? Will you put the time to understand the world around you?”

Levesque records the location of each sign on its reverse, building an ongoing archive of where and when the signs are found. The accompanying map and chart translate this information into visual form, revealing patterns in the distribution of signs across the subway system. While the data is shaped by the limitations of the collecting process and Levesque’s own travel habits, it offers a glimpse into which stations are painted more frequently. At the same time, the map becomes an analog record of his movements through the city—a personal geography traced through the accumulation of ordinary objects.

As collecting continued, Levesque discovered there are currently three species of “WET PAINT” signs that exist within the MTA. These three species are represented by three anatomically accurate paintings. Levesque has identified the font as a custom stretched Helvetica for each species.

Dennis Levesque (b. 1992) Dennis is a multi-media artist living in New York City. His work explores city infrastructure, found objects, and examining the subconscious connections we share every day. His approach is guided by an effort for the work to transcend itself; dissecting common themes or ideas and re-conceptualizing them to a format that engages his own curiosities and relationships with the things he encounter everyday, and himself.