People in the city follow signs every day, most of us never question how these symbols build the logic of a place, why and how these signs decide our movement?

With street signs as its clearest remains, Jamal Gunn Becker draws on ceramic sculpting and printmaking to reconstruct discarded infrastructure. He dismantles and reconfigures the arrows, ridges, and textures once meant to instruct, unearthing traces that speak to the present and stretch across time.

Jamal inverts the street signs he collects. On their reverse sides, welding marks and burnt glue leave black scars, which seem to uncoil from the traffic anchors, forming veins of maps—of rivers, organisms, mountains, galaxies—parts of nature we have yet to observe. These marks are more than typographic; they act as a new language that describes a nonlinear time and fate. When stamped with symbols and printed in color, each sign carries its future: where it will be installed, what it will instruct. Once welded into place, its past, present, and future are sealed at once, all its dents, splatters, and burn marks are pressed into the surface as a scar that holds its record and a seal that ends its path.

To Jamal, the sign is a clay vessel, a container of information. Its polished outer face signals to the public, while its inner life is hidden beneath a narrow mouth, inscribing a story that cannot be read at first glance.

Jamal overlays and rubs the scattered traces of Davis’s water infrastructure on clay to reveal a blueprint of how the city is managed. These traces are not maps, and the stories they carry are no longer about the signs or infrastructure alone. They speak to the cultural and political life of the city, where decisions were made, where rules were placed, and where they eventually fell apart. What they reveal is a timeline of those who existed, of what they planned, how it shifted, and continues to unfold.