The image has become part of the Nashville subconscious. More subtle than the omnipresent “Save Jack” posters, and nowhere near as sinister and domineering as the luminescent word “Adelphia” hovering on the Nashville skyline, it is visible on light poles and other surfaces all over the city: a face, with no visible features or expression, obscured by two hands holding a lens. It comes in two sizes: the widespread 2-by-2.6-inch sticker and the less prevalent 8.5-by-11-inch poster.

Unlike Shepherd Fairey’s brilliant “Andre the Giant has a Posse” sticker campaign, this image is not an instrument of its own promotion, nor does it change. The locally based artist behind the stickers and posters prefers anonymity, not so much for legal reasons, but because to put a face behind the campaign would distract from its impact. “I think that people are used to the fact that even the most subversive and covert advertisement methods still have an end to them and still have a trademark,” the artist explains. “They always tell you what they’re trying to sell, and this never does that. It’s never gone beyond being the exact same image every time; there’s never been any offered explanation. There’s never been any clues to anything.... I think that kind of throws some people off.”

The image creates a unique effect in the space it occupies, if only because it is austere and direct. It can be Rorschach-like in its absence of purpose, allowing the viewer to project his or her own thoughts upon it. “It came from an idea that a good friend of mine and I had to appropriate certain images from normal sources and subvert them with slogans,” the artist says. “I sat down one night and cut out images that I thought would have a particular resonance.” The end result was the lens image that now gazes out at Nashvillians from a disparate number of places throughout the city. While some people have interpreted the image as evocative of Orwellian paranoia, that reading may say more about the paranoid nature of modern life than about the image, which is in no way a signifier for anything other than itself and the act of sight.

Explaining his intentions, the artist says, “I think it’s just more important that people pay more attention to their surroundings, to what’s going on around them, noticing how much of the space around them is owned and advertises to them. We’ve become so accustomed to it that it doesn’t register that you’re being advertised to anymore, because everything is owned by everyone else.... I think that our society would benefit from a lot more personal explosions of creativity, whatever it is, rather than walking and driving through our daily lives, and the only new thing we ever see is a logo for a new cell phone company.”

Judging from public reaction, the project has indeed succeeded in making passersby notice their surroundings, but its anonymous nature has also allowed it to slip under the cultural radar. It is entirely possible to have lived in Nashville for the two years that the project has been going on and not to have seen—or, more appropriately, not to have noticed—any of the images, specifically because they do not draw attention to themselves. “I’ve always liked to put [the images] in places where people might look up while they were pressing a button while waiting to cross the street, or where they’re stopped at a stoplight but they’re stuck behind eight cars trying to turn left, and right there, pointing directly at them, is one of the images,” the artist says. “I don’t think I’ve ever put up a sticker randomly, and I’ve definitely never put up a poster randomly. It always has to do with the acceptance of the surface, dealing strictly in the terms of working with vinyl or paper and paste, and the adhesive qualities of brick, of which there are none. Metal is the best surface for paste, I’ve found.”

One of the primary issues that affect public art forms (specifically poster art, tagging, aerosol, and graffiti) is the fact that many people view them as an assault on public property. But in this case, the art in question isn’t really damaging. “Vinyl stickers are removable,” the artist says. “Wheatpaste-and-paper is a water-soluble substance that can be removed with not a lot of effort.” Art, in whatever form it takes, frequently deals with issues of social boundaries, and the fact that these posters and stickers could easily be removed but for the most part are not speaks of a certain public fascination with them.

The artist’s long-gestating Blakemore Project, the bulk of which can still be seen on the right-hand side of Blakemore Avenue heading from West End toward 21st Avenue South, is a fascinating expansion of the poster/sticker campaign; it’s a minimalist but intriguing example of drive-by art in the Hillsboro Village area: “I wanted to do something where you would see the same sequence of images, kind of like a flip-book. What I did was drive down the street and count all the poles, making allowances for things like lightswitch boxes and things like that, figuring out a pretty simple system of five images. I found some images that I thought would be interesting to work with, fairly abstract, and worked out a system of putting [the lens image] in with the others in a constant sequence.”

In terms of public response, one would think that the Blakemore Project is perfectly situated, located as it is in the heart of an arts-oriented neighborhood (around the corner from the Belcourt, a couple coffeehouses, and several art galleries). But ironically, it also represents the only case of censorship the artist has ever experienced—although not surprisingly, that cleansing came at the hands of a large and powerful private entity.

“The posters were all on light poles, on city property, which as far as I’ve ever been able to tell is basically fair game, as long as you’re not putting up anything offensive, and I don’t work blue. Two or three days after I put them up, I was driving down the street, and I saw two or three Vandy kids out there with wire brushes, and each of them had a different cleaning chemical in a bottle. It was the middle of last summer when I did this, and it was hot. It really made me feel kind of weird and bad for them—not because I’d done it, but because somebody somewhere was just saying that that couldn’t happen, even when it wasn’t advertising anything. I took a look at the street again when they were done and saw that, with probably a couple of exceptions, anything that was across the street from any property that Vanderbilt owned was clean. And if you look at it now, all the poles and surfaces there in front of property that doesn’t have anything to do with Vanderbilt, they didn’t touch.”

The repetitive sequence of images that still remain posted along Blakemore is formally innovative, yet here we are, a year later, and it has become part of the street. If you drive along this route every day, you may not even notice the sequence anymore, if you ever did. And yet complacency and acceptance are two things that this work strives against, impelling the viewer to pay attention to his or her environs. Amid the seemingly endless proliferation of flyers advertising work-at-home schemes and lose-weight-quick scams that multiply on telephone, light, and utility poles, the unsettling reminder of our own jaded distraction sits.

This project could have been done in any city in the world, but it happened here, and for that reason alone, it speaks to me—about the buildings (The Jacksonian) and spaces (Second Avenue up until 1990) and trees (100 Oaks) that have slipped away over the years. If you’ve spent an extended period of time in Nashville, you may have noticed the many subtle and not-so-subtle reshapings of our landscape. As such, it is not a case of this artist’s images being alien to the environment that they are placed in, but of these projects simply making clear how alien our own environment has become to us over the passage of time.