Traffic Sign Housewares: DPW Bowls and Transit Chairs

This man knows signage, how to find it, shape it, and put it to use! Boris Bally is a Providence Rhode Island based artist who specializes in metallurgy. He has found his niche using scrapped street signs that he meticulously searches out to match colors and textures. After his education at Carnegie Mellon and apprenticeships in Switzerland Boris has mastered the finer points of metal work and has turned to a medium with a rougher appeal. His works such as “Transit Chairs,” “DPW Bowls,” and “Review Mirror” are bold visually and make a social statement.

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Signage has become my passionate medium of choice not only because of the recycling message, but also its appeal to me as an extreme variation on the age-old tradition of enamelling. The materials employed here are gleaned from ten-foot-high, thirty thousand pound scrap piles.

Boris Bally has all sorts of housewares made from recycled signs, champagne corks, and bottle caps. He’s been working on it all from serving utensils, trash cans, dinner bowls, entire dining room sets, holiday wreaths, even a mailbox for all his fan mail!

Scrap street signs are materials ripe for the battles of this decade: Their obvious environmental message; The mockery of precious materials which are symbolic of the American struggle for wealth and success; Their subtle defiance of authority.