‘Sign, sign, everywhere a sign’: Montreal professor is on quest to collect all kinds of signs

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign.” No, it’s not the song by Canadian band Five Man Electrical Band or American band Tesla, rather the collection of a professor at Concordia University in Montreal.

Matt Soar is passionate about signs – all sorts of signs – especially historic ones. And he is on a quest to collect them all.

“It turns out people have lots of memories associated with signs and they’re often very positive memories. It’s nostalgia but it’s fascinating from a historic perspective,” explained Soar.

“I’ve earned a bit of a reputation for being a sign nut. So, I get calls, I get emails, I get tipoffs on social media. I get owners of signs reaching out to me. It’s really a quite wonderful process. I’m never quite sure who I’m going to hear from.”

Soar is director and co-founder of the Montréal Signs Project, which he launched in 2010 in collaboration with Nancy Marrelli, Concordia’s Archivist Emerita, as part of his Logo Cities research-creation initiative on architecture and hyper-commercialism. The project’s ever-expanding collection –— over 50 pieces at last count — showcases historically significant commercial and civic signs from around the city.

Soar says he happily donated 13 historic signs from the collection to the MEM for the public to see.

“Some of the signs we’ve donated to the MEM were in storage, some were already on the walls at Loyola. One of them is so enormous we couldn’t find anywhere suitable to install it at the university,” he says.

The MEM’s impressive new exhibition and event space is set to open later this year at the corner of Ste. Catherine Street and St. Laurent Boulevard.

“It turns that signs are integral to the process of making meaning out of our lives, making memoires. The associations it turns out is positive which makes it all the more pleasure to do the research project.”