Kate Just, A Sign of the Times: A knitted translation of Alyson Provax, Untitled: Everything, 2018, a billboard, letterpress installed at Nickerson St and Florentia St in Seattle, USA as part of a-lone with Vignettes + Gramma Press) (2026)
Hand knitted acrylic yarn, timber, canvas
91 x 66cm x 2.5cm

Alyson Provax’s sign Untitled: Everything (2018) uses letterpress and drawing techniques and features the text “everything is about to change” repeating over multiple lines, with certain words seemingly disappearing or fading away.

A text-based artist born in the USA, Provax often seeks to destabilise the certainty of text and visualise the personal experience of reading. Her work explores the value of uncertainty – in language and us.

Provax’s ‘everything is about to change’ billboard was created was for a lone, a series of temporary public art pieces in Seattle. At the beginning of the project, Provax read Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City and was inspired to create a billboard that would connect to the personal lives of individual viewers walking or commuting past it.

In Untitled: Everything, the letterpress phrase “everything is about to change” sends a validating and affirming message to anyone having the “personal and emotional experience of living in this time of change, fear, tumult, and uncertainty” (Provax). Although this work was made by Provax in 2018, it still offers a validating recognition of the scary and unjust state of the world, while also affirming the potential that there is always hope for change and forms of social, political and personal transformation.