TIMES SQUARE — Spring has arrived at the Crossroads of the World in true Times Square fashion — on a billboard.
From 11:57 p.m. to midnight each night this month, artist and UCLA professor Jennifer Steinkamp’s film “Botanic” — which depicts “flowering condolence plants floating inside a cubic framework” — will broadcast from more than a dozen billboards in the area.
The nightly event is the latest in the Times Square Advertising Coalition and Times Square Arts’ “Midnight Moment” series, which premiered in 2012.
The flowers in the film are “blown about by an unseen force, evoking the bittersweet associations of cut flowers in bloom — the opening of spring, celebrations of special occasions or a memory of loved ones,” a release said.
Museums including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga in Spain have displayed Steinkamp’s works, which “make use of the interplay between actual space and illusionistic space.”
“We have been fascinated with Steinkamp’s ability to trick us into perceiving a natural environment with the most artificial of technologies,” Times Square Arts Director Sherry Dobbin said in a statement.
