A sign of the times: Jeffrey Sincich’s quilted works show the art in the everyday

How often do you take a moment to really have a look at the signs on the streets you walk; your local high street, your commute to work, or your weekend wanderings? Maybe never, or, as Elizabeth Goodspeed highlighted in a recent column, you might particularly notice them on your travels, drawn to the difference compared with ones closer to home. Or maybe you’re like Jeffrey Sincich, an artist who falls into the ‘pretty damn obsessed with signs’ camp.

For Jeffrey, DIY signs and storefronts offer respite from the “standardised and generic” nature of so many other mass-produced visuals we now encounter every day. “Nothing is more interesting to me than stumbling across a building that has been altered for a specific reason by the owner or occupant,” he says. This could be a hand painted sign, a haphazard awning, or a display window full to the brim with discarded aluminium, Jeffrey lists. “I love seeing how people interact with their surroundings and create a unique landscape.” Now, Jeffrey spends much of his practice paying homage to such vernacular pieces of art, using found materials and quilting to create colourful renditions of his favourites.

Originally, Jeffrey studied ceramics at college in Florida; he tried to continue his practice after graduating but found it too difficult without proper facilities. Somewhat serendipitously, this need for a new direction occurred around the time sign painting was having a “huge resurgence” in the US, Jeffrey says. Inspired by artists he loved, like Margaret Kilgallen and Stephen Powers, Jeffrey started incorporating text into his work, and alongside his best friend Josh Stover, moved back to the same city in Florida and started painting text-based murals. Expanding further on this practice, the pair began to learn how to paint signs, and together went to Portland starting their own business that ran for six years. Though, after a while Jeffrey had an itch to start making art again, and he began experimenting with quilting, first recreating a San Francisco storefront, inspired by its unique tilework. Finally, during the Covid pandemic, Jeffrey began once again incorporating letters and signage into his physical works, leading to where his practice lies today.

Over the years, Jeffrey has developed what he describes as a “sixth sense” for discovering discarded building materials to repurpose. “I’ll be driving down a busy street and spot an old awning in the side alley next to a business, or notice a sign that has been repainted or covered up since the last time I passed it,” he says. “There are a lot of things I have trouble remembering, but I have a huge index of this type of thing in my head.” Having collected these discarded objects, Jeffrey hoards them in his studio until the perfect project for them pops up. Overall, his aim is to give these objects a “second life”; he evokes similarities between his practice and that of traditional quilting, in which handmade quilts become “heirlooms” passed on from generation to generation.

All of this attention to detail, magpie-like hoarding of material and sentiment transpire in Jeffrey’s piece Milk • Beer. Jeffrey was at first attracted to the original sign on a Los Angeles convenience store due to how poetic he found its choice of words, something he sees as similar to the satisfying intonation of ‘bread and roses’, a slogan used throughout the women’s suffrage movement. To complete the piece, Jeffrey salvaged a window grate, a bathroom vanity mirror he found in the rubbish, and a vintage piece of green window glass. “The way these all fit together to create a narrative behind the slogan was really exciting for me,” says Jeffrey. “It lights up like the sign and you can see each seam in the quilted section, kind of like stained glass. The window grate gives the slogan a sense of protection.”

In the main, Jeffrey wants his works to make people rethink how they interact with their environment, the way they take in and appreciate the things that surround them every day; their connection to humanity, stories and creation. “I hope that quilting these signs and objects might make someone look twice at the Clorox bottle painted on the corner store next to their home and think about who did it and the effort they put into it,” says Jeffrey. “It could have just been printed out, but it wasn’t.”